Interview with a man who cleans up blood and brains for a living

Where do the blood and guts go after a horrific suicide or grisly accidental death? Often it is scrubbed away by Aftermath, a crime scene cleanup company that began in a Chicago basement in 1996 and now has offices in 45 states.

Digital Dying spoke with co-founder and Vice President Tim Reifsteck about why CSI is not real, the most gruesome thing he has ever seen—it involved a man whose body got spread the length of a football field by a machine that processes plastics—and how he still sleeps at night.

Give us the sticky specifics of how the job works?

We cleanup after murders, suicides, unintended deaths, industrial accidents. Our technicians wear Tyvek suits, booties, respirators, and two or three layers of gloves; surgical gloves, high risk leather gloves and sometimes another leather glove on top of that if we’re dealing with lots of glass. The respirator helps filter out the pregnant odor of a decomposition, because bodies liquefy and really produce an unpleasant odor. When we arrive on site we’ll assess the cleanup and establish a controlled zone then we’ll do a bio-removal, observing what part of the structure has to be removed, for example, do we penetrate the floor and go through the room below. We deal with personal property, what can be cleaned and what must be disposed of. Step three is a bio-wash, we remove stuff from walls, we disinfect and deodorize.

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Is it tough to see bloody deaths every day?

Just like the police and coroner and funeral directors, you get desensitized with seeing blood and bodily fluids, but one thing you never get over is the human interaction you have with the families. This is the worst time of their lives, and that is very hard for our supervisors and technicians to deal with. People looking to work for our company will say, ‘I can see blood, I’ve worked in slaughter houses, I’ve been a hunter my whole life.’ When we have someone leave it is usually because they can’t deal with another crying family. Everyone deals with death differently, in one situation a family member might be crying at the top of their lungs and asking a technician to bring their loved one back while in another there’s a fist fight in the front yard over who gets to take home the TV.

Describe the most gruesome job you’ve ever had?

We had a body stuck through the engine of an airplane, we had to take the entire thing apart. And we’ve had industrial accidents where bodies have gone through machines. We had one involving a machine that processed plastic that was literally 100 yards long. Different parts rolled out different sized pieces of plastic, and there were blowers that sorted out the different sized pieces. We had a guy who went through that grinding process, so those blowers blew him 100 yards up and down that machine. We’ve had other situation where bodies have been in homes for months or years, people who died in attics and their remains ended up in the basement.

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Has the job changed your views on life and death?

One thing you recognize very quickly is it’s often the small things we do that cost us our lives. We get calls every day and we sit here and go, ‘Wow, this was the one moment in his life when everything pointed north.’ Just the other day a person was working on a car and the jack came out. This small little thing, he didn’t put the block behind the back wheel to stop the car from rolling, and that cost him his life. Or how many times people grab a gun and not think twice about whether or not it’s loaded before they pull the trigger. Or someone lives through a horrible car accident then has some small accident at home that kills them. You just don’t see when death is going to come. Our bodies can take a lot of punishment, they really can, but you take the wrong punishment at the wrong time and it costs you your life.

Are CSI and other crime scene shows getting it right?

Sometimes CSI stuff is pretty off, like this one where a person died in a bathtub and the bathtub overflowed and water was running down through this house and you had a cop along with CSI people just walk straight into the house with no protection. You would never do that, there are numerous OSHA and EPA regulations to follow. You have this rotting corpse sitting in a bathtub spreading contaminants and guys walking in there and the water dripping down on their heads and they don’t even have eye protection.

How on earth did you get into this business?

A friend and I were getting ready to go golfing and we noticed a fire truck and a couple squad cars parked outside a home in a subdivision across the street, a kid inside had commit suicide. An officer approached us and asked if we knew of anyone that could clean it up. We recommended some restoration companies but he said they’d already called several and no one wanted to touch the blood. So my friend and I offered to clean it up. You have a million things run through your mind because you don’t normally get behind the police line. When we entered the room we had no idea what we were walking into, we were both taken aback. The kid had used a rifle. The cleanup took forever, like seven hours. We kept reiterating to ourselves, ‘We’re here for the family, let’s keep pushing through, get this done for the family so the family can at least get back into the house.’ Everyone has this idea that the police does the cleanup or the coroner does the cleanup or the funeral home does the cleanup, but actually, they don’t.

**Digital Dying is not specifically endorsing Aftermath, there are many crime scene cleanup companies.