Episode #3 - Unattended Death

In today's episode, we'll be talking about an all too common facet of our work.  Unattended death projects are the type of trauma scene we encounter more than any other type of scene.  These projects can be more complicated as they often involve very strong and pungent odors due to advance decomposition, as well as postmortem legal issues.  We'll be talking about the in's and out's of unattended death as well as a specific project that we handled recently, with an unfortunate surprise for the tenant living directly below the affected apartment....

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Hello and welcome to After the Tape True Crime Scene Cleaner, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on the industries that quietly keep our communities safe, clean and functioning, often without us ever knowing. I'm your host, Doug Boruchin from ITS Environmental Services in New York. And today we're going to dive into a topic that's rarely talked about, but nevertheless, it's an important one. It's called unattended death. So let's start with the basics. What is unattended death? Simply put, an unattended death refers to a situation where a person passes away and their body goes undiscovered for a period of time. That period of time could be hours, it could be days, it could be weeks. It often occurs when people don't have contact with their family, or at least regular contact with their family. These deaths can be from natural causes, they can be from accidents, suicide, or even a homicide. The unfortunate reality is that by the time the body's discovered, decomposition has probably already started. And that brings not only emotional trauma for the loved ones, but also significant health risks and environmental hazards. Now I mentioned the word decomposition before, and let's talk a little bit about what that is. Decomposition is a naturally occurring process in which the body breaks down after death. When a body decomposes, it releases blood, bodily fluids, and gases that can seep into flooring, furniture, and even structural materials of a home. Along with the presence of bacteria, blood-borne pathogens, and strong odors, this makes the environment extremely unsafe for untrained individuals to enter. let alone to try and clean up. This is why professionals like the guys at ITS Environmental Services are essential when it comes to addressing these kinds of issues. So in case I haven't mentioned it, let's talk about who is ITS Environmental Services. That's us. We founded the company with a commitment to public safety, compassion, and we specialize in biohazard remediation, including crime scene cleanup, hoarding situations, mold removal, and yes, unattended death. We operate with discretion, respect, and the highest standards of safety. We're not your average cleaning crew. We're trained to handle emotionally difficult, technically complex, and potentially dangerous situations with but with professionalism and a great deal of care for the families. So let me set the scene. Imagine for a minute you're walking down the hallway of a multi-unit residential complex. As you get closer to the door, you begin to smell a faint odor that gets progressively stronger the closer you get. By the time you're standing in front of the door, you pretty much know what's going on inside, but knowing never really prepares you for what you're going to find. So let's take a little bit of a deeper dive into this. Let's talk about a job that we had done a while back in Manhattan. Actually, a call came in from a property manager in Manhattan. This was a mid-sized apartment complex, and one of the tenants hadn't been seen or heard from for nearly two weeks. So after multiple complaints of a strong odor, police conducted what they call a wellness check. When they did finally get the door open, they discovered that the occupant had been deceased for some time. If you've ever been around a dead body, if you've ever had that smell, it's not something you're ever going to forget. People ask me all the time, what does it smell like, Doug? What does decomposition smell like? I hate to do this to you guys, but if I had to compare it to something, Parmesan cheese. Sorry about that. I know that's going to be tough next time you try to sprinkle it on your pasta or on your pizza, but honestly, that's the closest match I can come up with. I'm so sorry about that. So what happened in this particular case happens once in a while. We've done a few of these, but the person was dead long enough that the decomposition was advanced. That means there was quite a bit of blood and bodily fluids that came out. This person was on the floor. This was a hardwood floor over plywood. And unfortunately, enough fluids came out of the body that it dripped down into the unit below and started dripping down from the ceiling. I mean, think about that for a second. Imagine that you are coming home from work and when you walk into your door, you're finding some kind of a brown, black liquid dripping seeping out of the ceiling with an overwhelmingly strong smell. I mean, can you imagine coming home to that? Unfortunately, the guy that lived downstairs did come home to exactly that. And obviously, this is not something that we'll just take care of a couple of days from now. This is an emergency. This has to be done right away. So ITS arrived that same day. And you have to remember when you go into a scene like this, you have to figure out how to attack it. You have to figure out, okay, where do I start? What's the smartest way to handle this? And what's the best way to do it without cross-contaminating other areas? And by cross-contaminating, I mean you walk through a scene and then you walk back into the hallway, you could take it with you. So you have to be very, very conscious of what you're doing every second of the job. Before we can even begin to clean up, we have to suit up. I'm talking about full body protective gear, respirators, boot covers, double gloves. Our crews actually prefer to wear something called a PAPR or a powered air purifying respirator. This is a unit that brings air in through a filter in a battery pack and up into a helmet, which makes it a lot cooler inside the helmet and it makes it easier to breathe. Remember, we have to change our suits possibly two or three times during a job due to the heat stress that comes with working in full protective gear. The apartment, it became a dangerous biohazard zone, not only due to the bodily fluids and the odor, but because of potential bacteria, airborne pathogens, and well, maggots. Yes, unfortunately, maggots are a common part of this kind of project of an unattended death. They're part of the process of breaking down the body, but they're these nasty little white curly things that just get into everything. They're under carpets, they're under the clothes, and they have to be eradicated along with all the other biohazardous material. Now here's another thing that might come back to you when you're going to sleep at night. What can happen sometimes with decomposition, unfortunately, when a body breaks is in an area for an extended amount of time and it gets hot the ambient temperature gets up there bodies can swell up they can bloat and unfortunately they can burst and when they do all the bodily fluids skin hair everything just goes 360 degrees around the room If you ask any policeman, a lot of times they'll tell you that they bring a coin with them if they have to go in to do a wellness check because what they need to do is if you go near the body and you touch it, it can pop and then it's going to get all over you. So they would flick a dime or a quarter onto the body so it would actually burst on its own, protecting them from actually getting any biohazardous material on them. Bursting was not the case in the scene that I was describing earlier. That person had died and they fell onto the floor and they were there for probably in excess of three weeks. And I can usually tell by the amount of biohazardous material that's in the room how long somebody actually was there. So that accounts for excessive blood and fluids that did compromise the floor, the subfloor, and then go down into the apartment below. So once we're all suited up, we have to start at the beginning. First things first, you have to scrape up all the bulk material on the floor. And this is done with things like almost like a six-inch putty knife or a scraper or something like that. And it's just basically scraped up into a towel and thrown into what we call a red bag. A red bag is what's used to transport biohazardous material or what they call regulated medical waste. This has to be transported to a facility that is licensed to incinerate. everything that they get that's the rules for that's one of the rules for biohazardous remediation you have to have a medical waste transporter permit and you have to be able to get this to a facility where it can be disposed of properly once the bulk material is removed from the floor you're basically looking at an outline of where the person had passed away and that's pretty eerie sometimes you can actually see the outline of legs, arms, heads, things like that. We've actually seen things that actually looked like a ghost. It was an outline of a head and arms, but it kind of tapered down so there were no legs. And we're looking at this, I swear it looked like Casper the Ghost. So this is some of the strange stuff that we see. So once you're looking at that outline at this point, now you have to remove the wood floor. And this is done with a circular saw. You're going to outline the area. And you're going to start cutting the wood floor. And you can see when you take the wood floor up that the fluids are in what's called the tongue and groove, which connects the two pieces of wood together. You don't really know how far the blood really spread out underneath the wood floor on the subfloor until you get to it. So you have to keep on cutting and cutting until you get to a point where you do not see any staining. Now that you've got the wood floor up, you're looking at a plywood subfloor. At least that's what was in this unit. Sometimes they're concrete, but this one had a plywood subfloor. That subfloor had areas where two pieces of plywood met and the fluids got into that little gap where they meet. And that's how it got down into the ceiling cavity and into the ceiling of the apartment below. So once the subfloor is up, Now you're looking at structural wood. You're looking at joists and things that can't be removed, obviously, because they're structural components of the building. So these have to be wire brushed and scraped and disinfected and then probably encapsulated. Now, what's encapsulation? Encapsulation is using what we use as a shellac-based primer. It actually contains the... staining and the stained wood and the fluids into the beams. You can't really remove them, obviously, so you have to get them to a point where it's safe. And that's what encapsulation is about. Now that the wood floor is removed, the subfloor is removed, the ceiling cavity structural wood is clean, disinfected, and encapsulated, now it's safe to go down into the unit below and open up the sheetrock ceiling and take down whatever's affected in that unit. So now you're actually working in two units at the same time. You've got people up top and people below. And once you're done, remember there's going to be a hole in the ceiling. So this poor person has to have somebody come in, patch the sheetrock, paint the entire ceiling so everything matches, and then try to forget that this ever happened. I mean, think about it for a second. If this was your apartment, Would you ever look at that ceiling the same way again? Probably not. I don't think I would. Once we're done with removing all the biohazardous material and building materials that were affected, there's a few more things that we do just to be safe, just to check our own work. First of all, we're going to do what's called an electrostatic spray of a surface protector. When we're done, we'll do the entire area. An electrostatic spray puts a positive charge on any disinfectant or chemical that you put in the unit, and it will grab onto things with a force 75 times stronger than gravity. So it really grabs onto things, and it provides a more comprehensive kind of coverage. You've probably seen these things. used in COVID disinfection and things like that. They became very popular. I actually did a TV spot on Fox News highlighting the electrostatic sprayer just when COVID was coming out. And within about two weeks, you couldn't get your hands on one. So it's a good thing we had them. Now, just to double check what we did, we will do what's called ATP testing. ATP stands for adenosine triphosphate. It is the energy... that's emitted from all living organisms. And that can be measured in what's called relative light units, or RLUs. So we have this meter. And we take a swab and check a surface that we cleaned to make sure that we're coming back with very low results. You want to get a result that's lower than 10 on the meter. I've seen dirty areas in the tens of thousands, which means there's lots of bacteria, lots of dirt, and biofilm, and things like that on a surface prior to it being cleaned. So we do this just for quantitative results for our own satisfaction to know that we did it right. We couldn't do physical testing. It would be a conflict of interest to actually do the remediation and do the testing as well. This just helps us ensure that we're being as thorough as we possibly can and making an area safe for reoccupancy. The last thing we need to do is desuit, or what they call doffing, your personal protective equipment. Donning means putting it on. Doffing means taking it off. So suit first along with your shoe covers or boot covers. Then your first layer of gloves Then your helmet from your powered air purifying respirator. And then your last layer of gloves, which should be clean because they were underneath the ones that you used during the remediation process. And don't forget the helmets and the battery packs for the PAPRs do also need to be decontaminated and disinfected when we're done as well before we put them back on to go into another job. Another thing that I wanted to mention about these types of projects, unattended deaths obviously occur when somebody isn't found for weeks at a time. So often there are no surviving family members or friends. These are people who were on their own, unfortunately. It's actually a very sad situation if you think about it. So what happens is if there's no family, if there's nobody to contact, the police will have to what they call seal contact. the unit. In other words, they will put a green sticker on the door and the door jam and no one is allowed to enter this area until it goes through probate or the surrogate court and they have a time to do some investigation. The particularly unfortunate part of that is we can't go in and clean this right away. So if there is an odor, if there is, I mean, we could probably have taken care of the ceiling below, But the problem with doing that is if you don't clean what's above, it's going to continually drip down. So that represents a problem as well. So unfortunately, the people who live in the adjoining units are stuck with this smell for some time. And it's very difficult to get the police to actually agree to let you go in because there are privacy issues that need to be addressed. taken into consideration. There's contents in there. There could be money. There could be jewelry. And they have to make sure they do a thorough investigation before anybody is allowed in there to do anything, including cleaning up the biohazardous material. Beyond that, you have to now think of if there were actually surviving family members. Sometimes these things happen because surviving family members live across the country or in another state or in another country. So it's not so much that they don't care about the person. They just don't see them as often. Now, think about that. I mean, these poor people, they're going to feel horrible about what happened. I should have known. I should have checked more. There's always questions. There's always guilt when it comes to somebody passing away. It's inevitable. Situations like these do not allow for an open casket, and that's going to make it much more difficult for the families and friends to process what actually happened here. There's much more to this than just what we do. And we understand that. So when we're dealing with the surviving family members or friends or whomever it is, we have to take great care in what we say and what we tell them. And they don't want to know exactly what we saw. But at the same time, we need to make sure we do the right thing and that they're taken care of just like the apartment is as well. There are countless numbers of people living on their own. So unfortunately, there's never a shortage of unattended death cleanups. I hope that after listening to this episode, you have a better understanding of the complexities and oftentimes the surprises that come with this type of work. So thanks for joining me for another typical day in the life of a crime scene cleaner. Look forward to seeing you on the next podcast and we'll have some more interesting stories for you and possibly some guests coming up in the next few episodes. If you're enjoying this episode and the podcast, please make sure to subscribe and leave us a review. Have an interesting story or something to tell? Hit us up on Instagram at AfterTheTapePodcast. And remember, every day you wake up is another day that's been given to you. So make it count. Stay safe. Stay curious. Check in on your loved ones. And don't forget what happens after the tape.