Working as a Crime Scene Cleaner: The Worst, Most Disturbing Scenes

Cleaning trauma scenes is no easy task. As you can imagine, the job is not for everyone. Still, we believe in making a difference in other lives. If you’d like to join us making a difference in others lives as well, you may want to read about what the job entails.

Otherwise, maybe you’re wondering “why did the crime scene cleaners turn the pictures around on Hannibal?” Please remember those are reenactments. While some cleaners might do that, most crews, like us, don’t. We detach ourselves from the scene completely and only acknowledge photos to clean them. Like almost everything else, it depends on the crew and the person. Like many other cleaners, we feel a sense of service to the family that lost the loved one, while others don’t want to be triggered by the memories left behind.

It’s an emotionally jarring experience. If you’d like a glimpse into our day to day world, please read the disclaimer before reading the stories below.

WARNING: The stories in this post contain potentially emotionally distressing, graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.

Below are quotes from our nationwide crews:

It was a vehicular death to occupant in home, this one case happened just outside of Los Angeles in a suburb. We go the call to go out on scene because a car crashed into a house and killed someone inside. When we got out there, there was a freaking passenger van not a mini van but like those old Dodge conversion vans that crashed down into the roof of this house. How does a vehicle crash into a roof you might ask? Well this home was on some what of a hillside and the street above is where the van was speeding the driver was drunk and slammed through the guard rails and went head in first into this house. I believe it was a daughter who was on a bed or sofa and a van crashed in on top of her and of course the driver was pretty much unharmed and was arrested by the police. They had to get a crane to lift the van out of the house and although there wasn’t much of a mess for us to clean up we boarded up the house and removed the debris.

A death caused by an explosion happened near San Bernardino County. We get on scene and the whole house has to be red tagged due to the severity of the explosion–not too much in the way of a fire. We later learned that the homeowner was working on his car in the garage. He apparently was using gasoline to clean his hands, so he took a small container of gasoline into his house and washed his hands at the bathroom sink and either when he flicked on the light switch or some other ignition source. It caused the gas vapors to explode, and being inside an enclosed small room, like a bathroom, was enough to send him through the wall. His body must have been shredded up from the blood left behind but the explosion also lifted the lid of part of the house and blew out most of the windows.

Unattended deaths are when a death is discovered after some time so it’s not uncommon find the body after it has popped (SFW). This one situation I went to one that was probably the worst soup case I went on. I say soup because that is what it looks like what is left behind. This case was at the start of the warming trend near LA, about a couple weeks prior it was cold in Los Angeles so many people had their heater on. This old guy lived alone and didn’t talk to his neighbors was known as a grouch and so no one noticed that they hadn’t seen him in a while. He had one of those doors with the mail slot so the mail just piled up inside the front door. Like I said it was cold a couple weeks prior so he had one of those old thermostats that was a dial and had his heater on to 88 or something like that. That and the heat of the warm weather sped up decomp. He was only noticed when the mailman who was a Vietnam vet recognized the death smell and called police to do a welfare check. He had died approximately 3 weeks prior, when we were called out we had to gut the entire property as every soft building material was penetrated with the death smell, all the windows had bio film on them, we had to cut out the section where he died in the carpet to remove it, that portion had his face still attached to it as the coroner only removed the majority of the body but the stuff that was stuck to the carpet was left behind. That piece of carpet looked like a Halloween mask attached to it as his hairline side profile down to his chin was still attached. This was one job where even though I was wearing full PPE I still threw my clothes underneath away.

“I mean there’s some tough stuff you have to live with. I don’t think it’s a job for everyone. I don’t even think it’s a job for 10% of the population. I think to do this, you have to be a 1% of a 1% of a 1%.” 

“You have to be strong but also able to mentally detach from reality. The cops see an average of one or two major crime scenes throughout their career. We see 3 a day sometimes! It takes a special breed of person to understand how much bad there is in the world out there. You just have to check out mentally.” 

“The smell never leaves you. It stays in your hair, eyebrows, for up to 7 days. It’s in your hair follicles, nose, clothes, ear wax. I’ve cleaned up thousands of crime scenes… And nearly nothing can prepare you for the first time you clean up the scene of a kid. It changed my entire life.” 

“I’ll never forget one homicide cleanup in Nassau County. A husband killed wife, 2 daughters, and the 2 dogs, then killed himself. It was a fuckin bloodbath. Both dogs are dead in the garage, 1 daughter is dead in the living room, the other daughter is dead in the hallway, the wife is dead in the living room, and he killed himself in the bedroom.”

“In some houses, you can feel the tension behind what happened there. I’m not even a person that believes in ghosts, but I’ve walked into houses with two other technicians and we all looked at each other and said, ‘do you feel that?’ and we all just shook our heads ‘yeah’. It was in Maryland. I’ll never forget it. You just knew bad shit happened in that house. It looked like it was out of a movie.”

“Picture doing a job after a mother loses her son. You do the whole job and leave without realizing you didn’t move a bookshelf… and then comes the call asking to come back to remove her son’s skull from behind the bookshelf. Or a tooth ricochets into a shoe. We get a found tooth call once or twice every 6 months.”

“After all things considered, it’s worth it when you bring relief to a family that just lost a loved one. It’s usually one of the worst days of their lives, and it just feels great to know you made a difference. Being able to help someone at their most fragile time, […] helping them when they can’t help themselves. No one should have to do this job for themselves.” 

“As CEO of this company, I’ve been in the situation where I’ve lost a loved one.. and although I could clean up my own crime scene, I wouldn’t. Not only is it bad for you mentally, physically, and emotionally, you have more important things to do with your time. Like grieve with your friends and family, and take care of arrangements. It can take up to 24 hours to finish a cleaning. For someone who is grieving and making arrangements, there’s just no time for someone to worry about the cleanup. And since it’s covered by insurance, there’s no reason for someone to do this. That’s the reason you have insurance.”

If you are in need of a clean up now, call us for fast, discrete, empathetic clean up and remediation support. We’re here 24/7, toll free +1 (844) 260-9436