The Death Squads

Photos by Ted SoquiThe storage facility in the San Fernando Valley has all the charm a slab of concrete can muster, which is to say very little. “It is very bloody,” warns the middle-aged manager as he walks through the dizzyingly hot, antiseptic-white third-floor hallway toward the yellow police tape, which is discarded next to the taped-off unit. “I also found blood and skull in the other units,” he adds matter-of-factly to his three companions. An employee at the facility had found William (not his real name) lying on top of the king-size mattress inside his storage unit four days earlier. No one heard the rifle shot that ended the 40-something former attorney’s life. Now the body is gone, and so are the police, but the mess remains. Manny Salcido looks more interested in the large black butterfly flying along the white ceiling and walls as it approaches William’s storage unit. “It’s his spirit,” says Mike Nicholson, as he dodges around bloody footprints and droplets of blood smeared in front of the unit. The coroner and police left their tracks. The crew gathers around the unit as the store manager rolls up the heavy metal orange door. Inside, the walls and ceiling look like a gigantic bloody Rorschach test. The high-powered hunting rifle accomplished its fatal mission. The blood splatter and skull fragments don’t just coat the walls and ceiling of the 12-by-15-foot unit, but can be found inside the boxes of legal papers, on William’s plates and bowls, in the jackets of his books and VHS tapes, saturated through his king-size bed, wedged in every orifice of his black leather sofa and ancient VCR, and coated on top of the shelves of his 6-foot-high bookcase, which took the brunt of the splatter. Blood and skull fragments the size of coins and golf balls are also visible in the units adjacent to and behind William’s. The air is thick with the sickly, sweet smell of blood. “It looks like a four-day job,” says Salcido, who wears Buddhist prayer beads on his wrist in memory of his mother, who died recently. David Redlus nods in agreement as he begins to unpack his gloves, doctor’s scrubs, and bottles of cleaning products and disinfectants, including the crew’s secret weapon — hydrogen peroxide, which, when sprayed on blood, fizzles and makes it more detectable. “Whatever it takes,” says the manager, adding as he walks away, “Let me know if you need anything. I am not squeamish about this sort of thing.” This is not an atypical start of the day for Clean Scene Services, a trauma-site-cleanup crew of which Nicholson is the wiry, good-natured, cigarette-huffing leader, and Redlus and Salcido his amiable sidekicks. There are 65,000 deaths a year in L.A. County. A lot of them aren’t pretty. Suicides, car wrecks, slipping on a wet floor, things like that, tend to leave some unfortunate aftermaths. Suicides are down nationally, but in 2003 — the most recent year for which there are reliable statistics — approximately 734 Angelenos killed themselves, according to the L.A. County Coroner. Another 3,130 died in accidents. Police count 922 homicides in Los Angeles and L.A. County in 2004. Deaths by natural causes don’t guarantee a clean corpse either; many who die outside a hospital or convalescent home, or far from family or friends, are left rotting until someone notices. That’s a lot of mess, and somebody’s got to clean it up. Historically, the task has been left to friends and family, but, over the years, companies that specialize in trauma-scene cleanup have emerged to fill the often-gory niche. “We used to care for our dead,” said Ed Evans, a former Los Angeles Unified teacher turned carpet cleaner turned trauma-scene cleaner. “Now we have alienated ourselves from it. People have such a terrible time with blood. People are spooked.” Evans started Bio Safe five years ago, after repeatedly getting calls from people who thought his cleaning business was affiliated with a crime-scene show on PBS. In the mid-’90s, only a handful of businesses specializing in trauma-scene cleanup were operating in the Southland. Today, with the popularity of crime movies and TV shows like CSI,death scenes have become sexy and lucrative. “One guy told me he got inspired after he watched PulpFiction,”said Mike Schott, a staff environmental scientist with the Department of Health Services’ (DHS) Medical Waste Management Program, which licenses the trauma-scene industry. “He said he could get rich.” Mike Nicholson, 39, started his career in the death business at the age of 17 when he began taxiing dead bodies to mortuaries. After graduating from East L.A. College, the dirty-blond, blue-eyed L.A. native, who walks with a slight limp, got a job at the L.A. County Coroner’s Office working in the lab preparing tissue samples. He stayed there for two years, until he realized that his job would not be made permanent. Nicholson and his wife, Carol, whom he met when they were teenagers, started Clean Scene Services from their garage in 1996. “At the time we had a white Toyota Corolla and a white trailer we hitched to it,” said Carol. “We were one foot ahead of everybody.” Their first job: cleaning up cat feces. Today, the couple lives in Agua Dulce and works on 59,000 square feet of land in East L.A., a short distance from where Carol Ann grew up. The property, once owned by a Japanese doctor, houses two former pediatric clinics and two small white bungalows perched side by side on top of a hill overlooking the 60 freeway. Down the spiral driveway are the clinics (where actor Edward James Olmos was delivered) that Nicholson uses as an office and to store equipment like his $5,000 oxidation machine, which kills the smell of decomposition. Thank-you letters and certificates line the walls of his office. So do photos of his wife and three children. Hanging on the wall near the door is a Three Stooges clock, a gift from his brother-in-law, which pipes in every hour: “Quiet, Bird Brain.” On top of Nicholson’s large wooden desk, next to an ashtray stacked with cigarette butts, is a file folder of newspaper clippings of his cleanup jobs. The headlines include “Woman Dies After Being Hit by Downtown Bus,” “Convenience Store Clerk Killed at 7-11,” “Boy Hit by Blue Line,” “Missing Man Found Under Carpet” and “Cop Kills Himself After Hit and Run.” In the last-mentioned story, 54-year-old LAPD Officer Bryce Wicks fatally shot himself in the head at his Acton home in 1997, the day after a hit-and-run collision in which he left a mother and baby seriously injured. Nicholson also keeps photos of trauma scenes on his laptop for insurance purposes and to show clients before and after shots. He has dozens of them, including photos of the leftover skin and remains of the badly decomposed body of a man who died on his toilet and wasn’t found for weeks, a large pool of blood from the 7-Eleven employee in San Pedro who was beaten to death with a bat, and the bloody trail of the man who slit his wrist in the shower and then his throat in the kitchen. When that didn’t work, the man ran over to his apartment window and jumped out, plunging to his death. “He left a trail of blood all over the house,” said Nicholson. On most occasions, Carol handles the business affairs while Nicholson, Salcido and Redlus do the cleanups. Last year, Clean Scene Services was hired for 162 jobs, averaging 12 to 15 cleanups a month. Their bread and butter comes from contracts with property-management companies, motels, convenience-store chains, the MTA and Amtrak. Most of the calls are for cleanups of decompositions, accidents, or suicides like William. “This is the first suicide we have had in a storage unit,” said Nicholson. “Hotels are generally the more popular places to commit suicide. People don’t want to mess up their own homes.”