AMERICA’S GORIEEST JOB
Crime scene cleaners mop up blood, guts – and worse!
GORY crime scenes are common sights on TV shows like CSI, NCIS and FBI — but when those bloodbaths happen in real life, someone has to clean them up! And that someone is often strongstomached Andrew Whitmarsh, co-founder and vice president of 360 Hazardous. His biohazard team is deployed once police have wrapped up their onsite investigations and removed all of the forensic material they need from crime scenes.
Whitmarsh has worked some of the most high-profile crimes the country has seen, including two in 2012 — the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre, which left 12 dead, and the Sandy Hook school shootings in Connecticut that killed 26.
The clean-up veteran tells The National ENQUIRER the things he’s seen are every bit as grisly as you’d expect. “There was one scene where a son killed his father with a weed whacker,” he recalls.
“It was an ‘injury situation. Almost every room in that house was affected to some level.”
The 2013 incident happened in a Chicago suburb. The son, Yashesh Desai, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was sent to a mental health facility.
An especially gruesome crime scene like that costs as much as $50,000 to clean up, says Whitmarsh. But less gory “confined and concentrated” crimes, like a poisoning or when someone is shot once in a single room, rings up a bill that maxes out at $7,000.
The carnage left by Batman killer James Holmes at the Colorado theater — where 70 survived gunshots — was a six-figure job. Holmes is currently serving life without parole at the nation’s most secure supermax prison, ADX