Mansfield company takes on grimiest of jobs: crime scene cleanups

MANSFIELD, Mass. — They arrive after the flashing blue lights dwindle and the yellow crime tape begins to sag. They are Trauma Services.

“We keep a really low profile when we pull in,” said Trauma Services founder and CEO Michael Wiseman. “There are no names on the trucks. Our people try to be as quiet as possible.”

Trauma Services is essentially a clean-up company. But it’s what the company cleans up that sets it apart: crime scenes, car accidents, bomb attacks, hoarder houses, homeless camps and more.

“When people call us, nobody’s calling for information,” said Wiseman. “They all need our services. It’s not that they’re shopping around. They need your services. And nine times out of ten it’s one of the worst days of their lives.”

Wiseman founded Trauma Services 35 years ago after the death of a loved one.

“We needed a clean-up for a loved family member,” said Wiseman. “And my wife and I had to decide the next day how to handle the situation. And I actually ended up cleaning it with another relative of mine. Nobody would come out there and clean up the blood. My wife said, you should start a company that does that.”

Today, Trauma Services employs 75 people and responds to about 9,000 calls a year. It contracts with the Massachusetts State Police and serves five other states in the Northeast. Over the years, the company has cleaned up some of the most notorious acts of violence, including the Boston Marathon bombing and the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine.

“Those are the scenes that seem to get to us the most,” Wiseman said. “We’ve had a couple of really horrific explosions over the years, bombs that have gone off. And those scenes are horrific just because of the residue and everything that’s left over.”

Wiseman said in one recent week the company dealt with twelve suicides.

So what does it take to work for a company that performs such a vital -- yet unenviable task? Wiseman said it’s a combination of factors. And while a strong stomach helps, so does sensitivity to loss. One advantage the crews take to every scene is that there are generally no surprises.

“We always know what we’re walking into,” said Wiseman. “Now when you open the door or when you walk into the bedroom or a shed where there’s a shotgun suicide, even though you’ve seen 30 of them, they’re still extremely tough to digest.”

That threshold usually determines if an employee is going to last Wiseman said.

“They’re going to see some horrific things in the first 3 or 4 weeks of work, because that’s how busy we are,” he said. “So we know if they last 4-5 weeks, they’re going to stay. If it’s not for them, we lose them in the first 2 or 3 weeks.”

Trauma Services offers counseling to employees overwhelmed by scenes -- but Wiseman said very few employees have taken advantage of that. More commonly, they counsel each other.

“The scenes are horrific,” Wiseman said. “So a lot of times they’ll talk about it in the locker room or the break room. They might go out and grab a beer after work or dinner and just talk about it, to just try and get their own feelings out so they can not keep it inside.”

So how were such scenes dealt with before Trauma Services? Crudely, suggested Wiseman.

“Ten or fifteen years ago, the only thing you’d see is the fire department coming in after everything is taken care of and all the evidence is collected, and they’d wash the blood down the closest drain,” he said. “We worked in a municipality where a new firefighter grabbed the hose and turned it on high. And as soon as it hit the ground, it came up and it splattered three other firefighters that were in the area. They were covered in blood from the streets.”

In another situation, Wiseman said a municipality thought it had cleaned up thoroughly after a fatal motor vehicle accident but didn’t realize brain tissue was still in the streets.

“So we were called in the next day because the family went out to put flowers and arrangements on that street corner,” he said. “And here they walk in and there’s still blood and tissue and other things on the ground. So that municipality called us in.”

Brian Ford began working at Trauma Services about a year ago. He had reservations, initially, about whether he would last.

“Would I be able to stomach it,” he said. “Would I be able to mentally disperse what I saw at work, at home?”

Ford, a father of two, said that in an odd way the job has given him a greater sense of appreciation for life’s sweeter moments.

“Some people say you might get desensitized to this kind of thing because you do it every day,” he said. “But I think it makes you actually hypersensitive to your surroundings and your awareness of life -- like, what’s going on besides your own life. Everyone has their own story and everybody has their own things going on. And we kind of get brought into the dark part of those stories. It’s definitely taught me that there are much worse situations than yours out there. No matter what you’re going through, somebody else is going through something worse than you today.”

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