Without a Trace

"I can go to a suicide at a hotel room, pick up a handful of human brain tissue and completely, legally put it in the regular trash to be set out on the curb," says Michael Tillman, owner of Amdecon, an Irving-based trauma cleanup service. "But you take a bloody Band-Aid at a hospital: It has to be treated as medical waste. I can take a mattress that's totally saturated in blood and set it out on the curb for trash pickup, and it's perfectly legal."

It's tough to tell which of Tillman's 15 photos is the most gruesome. Perhaps it's the bright red aftermath of a suicide in a strip-center office, complete with the caption "Right now there are no regulations regarding the disposal of this blood, tissue and skull fragments. Would you like to rent this office space next?" Or maybe the bloody bathtub: "Texas law does not require this to be cleaned and decontaminated by properly trained personnel. Texas law does not even require that a disinfectant be used."

Tillman would like to see a system set up like the one in California, where all trauma scenes are regulated by the state and can be entered only by workers with permits. He acknowledges this outcome would be good for his business, but says he's in the industry because he cares about what's happening to the waste.

"We've done homicidal shootings at convenience stores, and it if wasn't for us disposing of the hot dogs that were right next to the person being shot, they would've been sold."

Tillman thinks change will come soon, but perhaps only after a multimillion-dollar lawsuit involving a high-rent apartment and its next tenant, or maybe when a lawmaker "goes to a convenience store one morning, gets a cup of coffee and a hot dog that's been splattered with blood from the night before."

You have to be trained and licensed to be a barber, an electrician, a plumber. But anyone can be a death cleaner.

"Thirty years ago, yeah, it was just blood," says Tillman. "I mean, it was gross, but it was just blood. But now we know better. Because of HIV. Because of hepatitis B. Because of hepatitis G. I mean, we know better. We can no longer plead ignorance."

When people find out what David McGahan does for a living, they always ask two questions: "How do you do it?" and "Do you have nightmares?"

His answer to the first: "You can do it or you can't. It's black and white."

His answer to the second: "No."

But he is tormented by what he's seen people do to the defenseless.

"I've seen children huddled up in a closet, scared, and shot," he says. "When it comes to children, it's always tough. It's very hard."

Death cleaners employ a variety of coping mechanisms on the job. When disinfecting the old man's apartment, the boys of USA Decon passed the time talking about how the investigators on CSI seem too beautiful to wear protective equipment. Eric Thode says he used to pretend the messes were something else entirely, although this method proved especially difficult in the case of shotgun suicides, which inevitably left a spray of brain, hair and teeth.

"That was getting very human at that point," he says. "It was no longer just a mess."

No matter how he copes, a death cleaner can never forget he's dealing with a biohazard. To do otherwise would be to put himself and the public at risk. Demaret once met a woman at a meth-lab remediation class who accidentally got stuck with a hypodermic needle while cleaning up after a shootout between a dealer and the cops.

Almost as bad as getting infected is "the fear of not knowing, because when you get tested you've got to wait, like, six months to find out," Demaret says. "It's definitely a scary reality of what can happen, but that's the choice we make when we go in and do these, and that's why we work as safe as we do."

A death cleaner also can never forget there's probably a family grieving in the next room, waiting for the visitor to leave so they can begin mourning the memory of the deceased rather than the mess he left behind. Dealing with the families can be the hardest part, although some say it's also the most rewarding.

"We erase the footprints of the death angel," says Marilyn Johnson. "Once we get through with cleaning, you'd never know anything ever, ever happened."