Clean Up Costs Would Be Covered By Offender's Fees

Crime Scene Cleanup Bill Stalled On Hill

BOSTON -- A proposed bill aimed at helping the families of homicide victims move forward after the crime is stalled on Beacon Hill.

The bill, filed by Attorney General Martha Coakley, uses money from offenders' fees to pay to clean up crime scenes so the burden doesn’t fall on the grieving families.

Six years ago, Joanne Presti, 34, was raped and stabbed repeatedly in her apartment. Alyssa, her 12-year-old daughter, had her throat slashed. The woman's parents found their bodies three days later.

Days after the pair were buried, relatives returned to the apartment to collect their belongings and found a gruesome reminder of their loss.

Annette Presti told the Boston Herald that the apartment was covered in fingerprinting dust, the kitchen sink had been ripped out and holes were found in the walls -- but that wasn't the worst part.

"One of my sons called to say, ‘Mom, the couch is still here with Joanne’s blood all over it. Nobody took it away,’" she told the paper. "It was like going through it all over again.”

The addendum to the Victim Compensation Fund would help cover the cost of cleaning up the properties after the investigators have left.

“We don’t think about what families like the Prestis are left to deal with after the police leave. I was the (Middlesex) DA at the time. I was there that night and saw what the Prestis saw,” Coakley told the Herald. “We’re not asking for much here, just the chance to ease a family’s burden.”

Michael Bizanowicz, a Level 3 sex offender, was eventually convicted in the Prestis' deaths.

...Crime scene cleaning business tackles 'the gory side of life'

By Wendall Waters
GateHouse News Service

Ipswich, Mass. — A horrific scene was left behind when a man killed himself and 13 others in Binghamton, N.Y., April 3, and an Ipswich resident and former Marblehead schoolteacher was on standby to go down and help "clean the scene."

For Tim Riley, dealing with the aftermath of such a dreadful crime at the American Civic Center is how he makes his living. In fact, the Washington Street resident was set to head to Binghamton but another company was able to manage the situation without help. It turns out his services weren't needed, but while his work would not be appealing to most, it's a highly specialized field in which he takes pride.

Riley, the owner of Crime and Death Scene Cleaning Inc., said scenes like the one at the Civic Center are health hazards and must be cleaned accordingly.

CADSC is a member of the American Bio-Recovery Association, a nonprofit group of professionals who specialize in biohazard remediation. Another member company, Bio-Recovery Corporation, was in the Binghamton area and was on the scene of last Friday's shooting first to begin the cleanup, Riley said. In fact, he said, the company offered its services for free because of the Civic Association's good work in the community.

"Other companies would have charged them upwards of $50,000," Riley said.

After assessing the aftermath of the killings, Bio-Recovery Corp. called Riley and told him they would be able to manage on their own and take care of it in a matter of hours.

Riley explained there are two kinds of ammunition, one that expands on impact and one that does not. All non-military handguns, such as those used by the Binghamton gunman, use expanding ammunition, which causes more extensive internal damage and is more likely to kill, but does not expel as much tissue from the body.

ABC News anthrax case

Had Riley been called to Binghamton, it would not have been his first job on a high-profile crime case. He worked with Bio-Recovery Corp. years ago.

"We worked together on the anthrax case at ABC News back in 2001," he said.

NBC News, Riley said, had a similar incident around the same time but dealt with it differently.

"ABC News and NBC News," he said, "went through polar opposite routes."

At ABC, Riley said, CADSC and Bio-Recovery Corp. were part of a five-day project that included cleaning and disinfecting the company's three-quarters-of-a-million cubic feet of space. It took 70 people to complete the cleanup, but they preserved pretty much everything in the building, he said.

NBC, on the other hand, had its building gutted and everything thrown out, including employees' personal items, Riley said.

"There was no rapid test in those days," he said.

While waiting for test results on the samples the New York City Board of Health collected, Riley said, he and the other companies involved with the ABC cleanup got to work. The tests came back positive as they were finishing the job. When they were done, more samples were collected and tested and they all came back negative, Riley said.

Biohazard cleanup

Riley's work as a crime scene cleaner is his second career. He had taught high school in Marblehead for many years, but left mid-year in 1998 because of differences with his principal, he said.

In order to support his family while he was a teacher, Riley also worked as an EMT. During 19 years of EMT work nights and weekends, he saw many crime and death scenes.

"I had good exposure to the gory side of life," he said.

When he left teaching, he read a story about a man who was doing biohazard cleanup work. Riley, who has lived in Ipswich for more than 30 years, decided to open his own company specializing in biohazard cleanup. He joined the American Bio-Recovery Association in 1999 and later served as secretary of the organization. He also wrote the curriculum for a training course based on a manual written by one of ABRA's founders.

It was a struggle at the beginning, he said, but since then the business has been solid for him.
These days, Riley said he gets anywhere from three to 10 calls a week from people looking for work.

Biohazard remediation is not general janitorial work, Riley pointed out. Procedures, work clothing and equipment are highly specialized.

"There are 400 diseases carried by blood," Riley said. "We treat every drop of blood as if it carries every disease, because we just don't know."

Many people, he said, think dried blood is not hazardous.

"Dried blood can carry hepatitis C in it for over a year," he said.

Training to deal with biohazards is ongoing, said Riley, who has two full-time and seven part-time employees. Workers are trained when they join the company. They get refresher courses each year and they have to be retrained every time a new technique is developed or a new chemical is discovered.

Individuals and companies like CADSC associated with ABRA have the expertise to handle biohazard remediation. ABRA now has about 525 people certified all over the world and has 72 member companies, Riley said.

Their job, when a tragedy such as the Binghamton shootings strikes, is to bring both knowledge and capabilities to bear in cleaning the scene thoroughly so there is no addition damage to human life or property.

"In this economy," he said, "anybody who does any sort of cleaning thinks they know how to do this, but they don't"

The Ipswich Chronicle

Teen Suicide Risk Factors: Parents Are Too Often Clueless

By Nancy Shute

Suicide is the third leading cause of death among teenagers, and it's a tragedy that can be prevented. Given that almost 15 percent of high school students say they've seriously considered suicide in the past year, parents and friends need to know how to recognize when a teenager is in trouble and how to help.

Parents can be clueless when it comes to recognizing suicide risk factors, or at least more clueless than teens. In a new survey of teenagers and parents in Chicago and in the Kansas City, Kan., area, which appears online in Pediatrics, both parents and teenagers said that teen suicide was a problem, but not in their community. Alas, teen suicide is a universal problem; no area is immune.

The teenagers correctly said that drug and alcohol use was a big risk factor for suicide, with some even noting that drinking and drug use could be a form of self-medication or self-harm. By contrast, many of the parents shrugged off substance abuse as acceptable adolescent behavior. As one parent told the researchers: "Some parents smoke pot with their kids or allow their kids to drink."

Both teenagers and parents said that guns should be kept away from a suicidal teen. But since parents said they didn't think they could determine when a teenager was suicidal, parents should routinely lock up firearms, the researchers suggest. That makes sense. Firearms are used in 43.1 percent of teen suicides, according to 2006 data, while suffocation or hanging accounts for 44.9 percent.

The good news: Both parents and teenagers in this small survey (66 teenagers and 30 parents) said they'd like more help learning how to know when someone is at risk of committing suicide and what to do. Schools and pediatricians should be able to help, but we can all become better educated through reliable resources on the Web. These authoritative sites list typical signs of suicide risk, and they also provide questions a parent or a friend can ask a teenager to find out if he is considering killing himself. Here are good places to start:

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry lists signs and symptoms of suicidal thinking, such as saying things like "I won't be a problem for you much longer."

The American Academy of Pediatrics urges parents to ask the child directly about suicide. "Getting the word out in the open may help your teenager think someone has heard his cries for help."

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides free advice to someone considering suicide, as well as to friends and relatives, at 800-273-TALK.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness's teenage suicide page makes the point that talking with someone about suicide will not "give them the idea." "Bringing up the question of suicide and discussing it without showing shock or disapproval is one of the most helpful things you can do," the NAMI site says. "This openness shows that you are taking the individual seriously and responding to the severity of his or her distress."

Teen depression and suicide risk linked to late bedtimes and chronic sleep deprivation

A report from the Jan. 1, 2010 issue of the journal Sleep found a surprising link between the typically late bedtimes of teenagers and teen depression and suicide.

Parent-set bedtimes affect teen's mental state

Adolescents with parent-set bedtimes after midnight had a 24% increased incidence of depression and a 20% increase in suicidal thoughts compared to teens with a bedtime before 10 pm.

Most of the teens in the study reported adhering to the bedtimes their parents set for them, showing that it's up to parents to give appropriate guidelines for avoiding sleep deprivation.

Length of Sleep Matters for Adolescents

The length of sleep matters, too, according to the researchers. Teenagers who reported getting less than five hours of sleep a night had a 71% higher risk of depression and a 48% higher risk of suicidal thoughts than adolescents who got 8 hours or more of sleep.

The AASM (The American Academy of Sleep Medicine) recommends nine or more hours of sleep a night for adolescents.

The study was conducted by James E. Gangwisch, PhD, assistant professor at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, N.Y and colleagues and looked at over 15,000 teenagers' sleep habits and mental states. The teens in the study ranged from 12-17 years old.

Other studies indicate more benefits from increased teen sleep.

In previous studies, shorter sleep durations in children and teens have been linked to higher rates of obesity, school performance and general social well-being. And adolescents who don't get enough sleep due to insomnia are far more likely to develop mental health problems, including substance abuse.

How Suicide Cleanup is Undertaken

Suicide cleanup is a part of the broad based service of Crime Scene Cleanup which involves crime and trauma decontamination and restoring it to its previous state. It is a a niche market in the cleaning industry and involves cleaning the biologically contaminated scene of ones death like suicide, homicide or accidental death. or a scene of a methamphetamine lab.

Broadly speaking, crime scene cleanup and suicide cleanup is almost same but there are few exeptions to this rule. Suicide cleanup requires some extra physical effort and psychological sensitivity that the technicians should be able to handle.

Following are some examples illustrating this. A suicide generally involves close range of weapon to body and so in-depth decontamination and thorough cleaning is required. The cleaners also have to handle family members who might be present at the scene searching for answers that why their beloved person decided to end his/her life. The technicians need to remove all traces of any evidence of a suicide so that no remains are present for family members and friends that might remind them of the tragedy.

Restoring of a suicide scene also means clean and restore sentimental items that mean the lot to the family of the deceased and requires additional time and effort.

On a visual inspection of any suicide scene you will generally find a lot of blood and bodily fluids, but invisible to the eye, a great amount of biohazard contamination is also bound to be there. The suicide cleanup technicians have to search thoroughly in all areas, even those that can not be seen or accessed easily and remove all traces of them from the scene. Most suicide cleanup services have their staff trained in not only dealing up with decontaminating and cleaning up issues but also about dealing with family and friends with sensitivity and compassion. Since most of such companies work in association with leading insurance companies so they can even help you to bill the insurance company directly thus saving you all the hassles.

A suicide cleanup consists of the following steps.
Firstly the scene should be evaluated. Next all contaminates should be located and decontaminated. A thorough search should me made again to decontaminate any traces of contaminates that might have been left out. All types of bio hazardous agents should be properly disposed of. Any microscopic remains should be treated with chemicals and the environment should be treated for odors. Last but not the least all tools and equipments should be disinfected. But before you attempt to clean a suicide scene on your own it is always better to consult a trained professional first.

Clerk’s death shocks store patrons

Clerk’s death shocks store patrons
Victim identified; no arrests made
By Michael Corcoran, Globe Correspondent | December 28, 2009

Business owners and customers yesterday mourned the death of convenience store clerk Surendra Dangoi, identified as the victim of a weekend shooting in Jamaica Plain.

Dangoi was shot at about 3 p.m. Saturday while working at the Tedeschi Food Shop at Eliot and Centre streets in an apparent robbery, police said. He was later pronounced dead at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Early yesterday, the store, which is across from the Soldiers Monument at the end of a long string of businesses in Jamaica Plain center, was closed for inventory, according to a sign on its door.

A crime-scene cleanup company van was parked outside, and bouquets of flowers lay at the store’s entrance. On the pavement just in front of the store was a purple-and-white message that read “Stop violence, create [peace]’’ with a drawing of a dove.

By early yesterday afternoon, the store reopened. Employees deferred questions to the Tedeschi corporate office, which did not return several phone calls but released a brief statement from its president, Peter Tedeschi.

“We at Tedeschi Food Shops are deeply saddened by the loss of Surendra Dangoi, as the result of this senseless act of violence. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and loved ones during this very difficult time,’’ the statement said.

Police have released pictures obtained from the store’s security cameras, depicting a suspect who they said probably fled the scene with the help of a getaway driver. No arrests have been made.

“We are still asking the community to help us locate the suspects,’’ said Officer Joe Zanoli, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department.

Dangoi’s age and address were not released yesterday. It also was not clear how long he had been employed at the convenience store.

Neighbors expressed disbelief at the news of the shooting.

“I go to that store to buy the paper every day, and I always see those boys,’’ said Margaret Leblanc, a resident of Jamaica Plain for 45 years. “It is horrible to hear about this kind of violence happening so close to home. What a world we live in.’’

Harry Dhoci, the co-owner of JP House of Pizza, just a few buildings down from the Tedeschi shop, said the killing is a warning for small businesses to be careful when faced with violence.

“You have to give them the money, not be aggressive, and stay alive. Give them whatever they want,’’ he said. “I have a wife and a kid. That is the real important thing. That is far more important than money.’’

Dhoci said he would not change his security measures, but would continue to preach common sense and caution to his employees.

“I have been here five years and we have never had a problem,’’ he said. “But something like this, it can happen to anyone.’’

Why you need crime scene cleanup services

By Alex Thomson

Crime scene cleanup or trauma scene cleanup after the death of someone either violently or naturally is by and large the responsibility of the victim’s family. Even till few years ago, there were a handful of cleaning companies that specialized in trauma cleaning service. But today this niche service has emerged as a lucrative business and there are many companies who provide this service.

Trauma cleaning service requires special experience, skills, equipment and expertise to deal with different types of bio-hazardous waste and dispose them efficiently with the minimum possible emotional stress to the victim’s family.

The most traumatic form of death is violent death and leaves the victim’s family feeling both victimized and traumatized. Coming to terms with the unnatural death of a loved one is in itself an uphill task for the bereaved family, and to top it they have to deal with other practical matters like making funeral arrangements, dealing with insurance issues, contacting surviving family and friends and locating wills. Furthermore, in case of violent crimes the police and the media are also involved. This can really overwhelm any family. Here is where trauma cleaning service comes to your rescue. They lighten one of the heaviest burdens, that is of dealing with the horrid murder cleanup. They will take care of the crime scene cleanup, ensuring that the scene is restored to its pre-incidental state as far as possible and in the most quick and efficient manner thus allowing you to deal with other important matters. Most service providers work discreetly and protect the confidentiality of the sufferer and family.

Most of the times, the crime scenes are so ghastly that they can induce additional emotional trauma in victim’s friends and family. By hiring professionals for cleanup, you can reduce this emotional stress. Immediately after death the nature begins its process of breaking down the body. Unattended death scene and dead bodies can be dangerous as it gives rise to blood borne pathogens, mold spores and bacteria. You may try to clean the area by yourself but the exposure may result in flu-like diseases or direct attack on the respiratory system. So it is advisable to leave this job to professionals who specialize in bio fluid and blood remediation.

The total cost involving a trauma scene cleanup will depend on a number of factors. One of the most major factors is that how many technicians will be needed for the job, how long will the job take and the quantity of hazardous material that needs to be treated and disposed of. It can range anywhere in the range of $100 to $1000 per hour. Some people might call this business as capitalizing on death but it is still essential and indispensable in case of a death.