As I recall, we leave for the job early, at about 8:30 am. My co-worker Keith and I drove up in the Bio-Clean truck, towing the trailer behind us to our destination.

We arrive on the scene. It’s a pretty little house, tucked away in a pretty little wooded area, next to a pretty little church. An early morning mist had covered the mossy lawn and trees with prismatic beads of water. A quaint scene, barring the fact that the entire yard is surrounded in POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape, and there are two police cruisers in the driveway.

Our boss pulled in the driveway right after we did. He put on his purple nitrex gloves, and was greeted by the officer in charge. Camera in hand, Andy and the Officer entered the crime scene to assess the damage. There Keith and I were, sitting in the truck, waiting.

It was time to psyche up-- T-minus 1 minute until I am stepping foot into a home where a several people were brutally murdered. As Keith and I sat, noticeably less talkative than we were 5 minutes ago, I noticed the van sitting in the driveway. It was a purple caravan, or something like that, and it clearly belonged to the family that had lived here. They had put some white decals on the bottom left corner of the back window—7 goofy stick figures; one mommy, one Daddy, three girls, three boys and the family pet.

Whoa.

Andy and the officer came out of the house, and we donned on our Tyvek suits. This was it. I opened the door.

Whoa.

As soon as my eyes hit the interior of the house, it was like an episode of CSI in my head. I saw the entire crime happen before my mind’s eye in half transparency and slow time. With a glance you could see where the killer entered. You could see where there was a struggle between two large guys, and you could see the trail of blood marking the victor’s path into the kitchen.

I carefully stepped into the home, hesitant to disturb anything in the crime scene, even though I knew in a few moments I would be knee deep in it, removing destroyed possessions, broken glass, and liters of blood from almost every room in the house. I stepped into the dining room, where the struggle occurred, and looked into the kitchen.

WHOA!

Immediately, I see that THIS is the room where last night, things went from bad, to nightmare-from-hell.

Right about know, you, as well as me at the time, are asking yourself, “What happened here!?” Here’s the story I was told.

There were two adults living in the house, a man and a woman. The woman was currently in a relationship with the man she lived with, but she used to date a motorcycle gang member. They had split up a while ago, but she had met him again recently. The night of the incident, the motorcycle gang member came to the house.

He first came to the door in the kitchen. He was not welcomed into the house. Obviously enraged, he tried to break in through the door. How enraged was he? Well, the kitchen door had a window made out of tempered glass, and he had actually made a huge spider web crack in it.

The Assailant gave up on the kitchen door. The current boyfriend ran to his bedroom to get a machete for self defense.

The Assailant ran around to the back of the house, where he found the dining room bay windows. This was his point of entry.

Now, there were four window panels in the bay window. They were each a little over a foot wide, and had double paned glass. This guy must have had the bellowing rage and fury of a rodeo bull on PCP. He was a big guy, and he managed to actually get through the tight window partitions, even with two panes of razor sharp broken glass in his way. He burst through so violently that broken glass had been sent hurling 30 feet across the house from the window to the front door.

The Assailant was now in the house, and the boyfriend emerged from the hallway with machete in hand. The Assailant pulled out a tactical folding knife.

I’m not a betting man, but if I was going to wager on a fight between a guy with a machete and a guy with a tactical folding knife, I would but my life savings on the machete. In this situation however, I would have ended up broke.

The current boyfriend charged, but the Assailant must have dodged or absorbed the blow. The Assailant grabbed the current boyfriend and threw him into a glass bookshelf. Once the boyfriend was dizzied and pinned against the bookshelf, the Assailant moved in and stabbed him several times, leaving him with mortal wounds, unable to move.

The whole time this fight is going on, the woman of the house is in the kitchen on the phone with the police. Frantically, she tells the police that her ex had broken into her home, and that he was stabbing her boyfriend.

The Assailant walked into the kitchen.

The woman’s 911 call becomes more frantic. “He’s coming closer to me! He’s punching me, he’s punching me!” she screamed.

In actuality, he was repeatedly stabbing her with his folding knife.

As if that wasn’t crazy enough, the Assailant wasn’t finished there. With his ex and her boyfriend now dead and dying, he decided to end his own life: By stabbing himself in the heart.

Needless to say, with three people dead by tactical folding knife, there was a lot of blood in the house. It took Keith and I over 10 hours to get it all clean.

The first hour was pretty heavy. The thing I didn’t take into account about cleaning up a crime scene like this is that it’s more than just the blood and gore that you have to deal with and get over, it’s seeing the lives of the people who are now no longer with us. Sure, cleaning up pools of coagulated blood is not great for the psyche at first, but seeing the book bags of the small children in the house, covered in their parent’s blood… man. It’s heavier than you can even imagine, especially when it’s the first time you’ve ever had to deal with it.

After the first couple hours, as the physical toll of cleaning in a hot Bio-suit suit began to wear on me, I started to become desensitized to the emotional ramifications of the cleaning. I thought less about what happened, and what was going to happen to the surviving members of the family, and started to think, “wow, cleaning up blood sucks.”

At about hour 8, some family members came to the house to find some jewelry that belonged to the deceased woman. An older woman walked into the house and immediately began weeping with all the sadness of a parent who had just lost a daughter, the mother of their grandchildren. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone cry like that.

It really got to me, seeing this woman try and cope with her loss. I tried to help her find what she was looking for amidst the ruins of what once was her daughters help, but I could barely even understand what she was saying over her sobs.

I almost started crying with her at one point. The entire situation was so intense. Consoling and talking to the families of the deceased is something you have to do in this job. It was my first time, and I was almost at a loss for words entirely. I tried my best to help her, and give her my condolences.

Right before the woman left the house, she stopped sobbing long enough to thank Keith and I for what we were doing. She said she didn’t know what she would have done without us. She must have thanked us 10 times before she just started to cry again and left the house.

Having that woman in the house was without a doubt the most emotionally strenuous part of the day, but it was also the most rewarding. Her thanks were so earnest, and so heartfelt-- I knew that we had helped this family out.

When the job was finished, I knew I had accomplished what I had come in to do. I thought that seeing and interacting with gore and blood would be what prepared me for a possible, horrible, violent event later in life, and it did a little bit. Dealing with the emotional stress was so much more a part of it than I thought when I first started the day. That woman’s torn soul, and those children’s backpacks splattered in blood… They affected me more than all the things in that horror show of a house combined.

I am tougher now because of the crime scenes I have cleaned. I’m not tougher because I can deal with blood and terrifying gore, but because even through all of the haunting emotional stress, I can keep a level head and help those in need. I can stay strong for those who are at their most distraught and vulnerable, and I can reset at least one part of a shattered life back to the way it was.

Anyone with proper training can clean up blood, but being strong enough to clean up someone’s life… that’s an entirely different story.