Blood, bullets and blacksnakes: The life of a Virginia crime scene cleaner
Petersburg Sept 29 2020
Marc Garber’s work environment is a little unorthodox. Most people find themselves clocking in at an office, or a home office, but Garber spends his days knee-deep in other people’s nightmares.
“Once we remediated a car in Petersburg, where the driver was shot in the head and murdered,” Garber said.
Garber comes home from work with stories that aren’t appropriate to discuss at the dinner table. When he does talk about work, his language can assume an almost clinical tone.
He recognized that the carpet and headliner needed to be replaced and the center console and driver’s seat needed a deep clean after a significant amount of blood stains were left on the surface.
He needed the help of a car mechanic to remove the contaminated pieces.
“While everything was out we performed an additional cleaning, and then the car shop workers were able to put it all back together. We returned the car to our client, who was the sister of the deceased,” Garber said.
Despite the air of objective analysis in Garber’s words, some stains are harder to scrub out than others. There are scenes that will never leave his mind.
At another murder scene that Garber worked, he was struck less by the violence and more by the signs of a normal life that he found in a hotel room he was hired to clean.
The man who rented the room had traveled from Ohio, where he’d killed a woman at his apartment. When he got to Virginia, he invited an acquaintance to his room, killed her and then shot himself. What Garber saw, entering the room, were signs of the expectations of a normal evening out with a friend.
“When we got to the hotel room, her belongings were still there,” he said, talking about the victim. “There was food from the Olive Garden uneaten.” Garber said. “All she was thinking was that she was going to have dinner and spend the night with him.”
Garber paused.
“It makes you think about life. It makes you think about the tragedy that occurred.”
Bodies, boxes and everything in between
Garber is the owner of BioOne Richmond. He and his team of workers provide cleaning services after incidents involving murder and suicide. BioOne also mitigates other extreme situations, including hoarding. These jobs often involve handling more than just piles of boxes—they may include cleaning up built-up feces from insect and rat infestation, rotting furniture and floors, human waste and mold.
Garber’s work has taken him over an hour from the greater Richmond area. Recently he helped clean up a construction site in Charlottesville after a COVID-19 outbreak. He has responded to calls in Petersburg, Colonial Height and Hopewell since he started BioOne in 2018.
The company works scenes and situations that don’t make the news but are just as important to the people they affect.
Garber and his team once responded to a call to clean a hoarding situation in a house. The woman who lived there had dementia and was injured.
“There were rooms she couldn’t even walk into and there were things all over the floor which she ended up tripping on.”
The woman couldn’t get up by herself and had to call 911. When the EMT arrived, they couldn’t get a stretcher past the front door.
When Garber arrived, some rooms were filled to the brim with clothes, rotting food, furniture and filth. As he waded through the house, he found three dead cats, one dead raccoon, and one very alive black snake. Mouse feces were scattered all over the floor.
Hoarding calls aren’t usually urgent requests. Garber’s company is available 24 hours a day for more urgent situations like suicide and murder.
Garber once received a call from a second-in-command police officer at 3:30 in the morning. He was called to clean up what they believed to be an officer-involved suicide.
A major part of the job is immediacy and reliability.
“The family needs help right now,” Garber said. “These people have just suffered a tragic loss and they are having one of the worst days of their life. Figuring out the details of the insurance or any form of payment is the last thing on my mind.”
Help first, business second. Garber says this is his company’s primary philosophy when it comes to crime scene clean-up. He doesn’t want family members stuck in a crime scene for longer than they have to be.
Once arriving at the scene, the team sets up a staging area where they prepare themselves with appropriate attire such as biohazard suits, gloves and respirators.
They use chemicals that people can’t find over the counter. All the solutions are made by chemists exclusively for BioOne.
After they enter the crime scene, they throughly scour everything. They use flashlights even in lit rooms.
“We’ll be on our hands and knees with flashlights going through every square inch. Sometimes you’ll have skull fragments and brain matter. We have to be very meticulous because it would be horrible to find a piece of loved one two or three months later,” Garber said.
Crime scene clean-up on average takes from three to four hours. Garber’s longest cleaning case took more than 10 hours.
“The home was condemned for human habitation and the entire home needed a significant amount of work.”
Garber ranks the severity of a hoarding case from one to five. That house was a five. It took seven days and required more than four 30-yard dumpsters.
One of the mysteries of cleaning a hoard scene is never knowing what could be around the corner. The team often finds rotting food in the refrigerator, giving off a strong odor. Smells often have seeped into the carpets, which then needed to be removed.
“There were cobwebs and some were indicative of black widow spiders. There were also wood roaches and we fully expected mice and feces,” Garber said of that four-dumpster case.
The team had to trudge through a strange combination of partially eaten food alongside brand new clothes with the tags still attached to navigate themselves around the house. His team finding animals dead or alive isn’t uncommon.
The kind of work that BioOne does isn’t for the faint of heart.
Garber’s business idea came after working in medical sales for 17 years.
“I was used to being around blood. I was selling laboratory blood testing. Granted, it was in test tubes, not splattered all over the place.”
Garber also sold advanced wound care treatments where he regularly saw open wounds. He thinks that some of his clinical experience prepared him for the work he does now.
When he first started his business in 2018, he had difficulty attracting clients since the company was not widely known. He’s been building his reputation through return clients in property management, county mental health departments, and school systems.
People might think that the police call in companies like Garber’s after responding to a crime scene. But police departments are not permitted to refer private companies.
Many family members have to do the research themselves, according to Garber.
“A lot of times it will be a friend of the family or an extended relative that makes the phone call and they don’t want the immediate family member to have to take that on.”
‘I know what I’ve signed up for’
Garber and his team often feel the weight of constantly responding to crisis where they have to interact with the grieving family members. They find themselves having to balance the obligation of cleaning and comforting the family.
“I know what I’ve signed up for. I know it’s not pleasant, but somebody needs to help the grieving family members because the last thing they should have to do is clean up after their recently deceased loved one,” Garber said.
He has cleaned up crime scenes of adults from early 20s to late 70s. So far, he has been lucky enough not to get a call about a child. He’s a father of three children and does his best to make sure someone else is on call when he is with them, but there are times when he has to put work first.
“I worry about the day I get a call for a child.”
Garber and his workers never question their dedication to the job even though it comes with some inevitable fears.
“I can’t fix everything, but I can give them at least one less thing to worry about,” Garber said.
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