The Cleaners of Death

For the past two years, the artificial tree has stood in the middle of the living room, with its golden garlands and pine cones covered in fake snow. On the sideboard, in photo, the couple poses at the time of the happy days. But, at the foot of the long wooden table, the blood has dried. Here, on January 6, 2019, a 69-year-old man killed his wife with two bullets to the chest. Since then, no one has been allowed to enter the house: the investigation was not complete.

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Baptiste Girardet gives the instructions: “Miguel and Corentin, you take care of the table and the carpet. There are a lot of works of art and trinkets, we go there nicely… ”The three men in white coveralls, filtering masks on their faces, speak little. Romain removes the red adhesives placed on the doors and windows by the judicial services. Ironically, sticker marks are the hardest to remove. After the floor, Miguel and Corentin inspect the furniture in order to clean the blood marks, then pass an ultraviolet lamp on the walls and the ceiling to make sure nothing escapes them. From the library with the broken windows, Romain pulls out a thick book, a “Kama-sutra” in which a bullet had lodged. The police took away the projectile. The book ends up in the trash with the carpet and a small painting, irrecoverable.

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In the next room, the victim's daughter is sorting through papers. She had considered calling a home cleaning company but had decided against it. "We can't send people who aren't prepared on stages like that," she whispers. So the funeral directors recommended Sang Froid, a company specializing in the cleaning and decontamination of traumatic incident sites. Its founder is a former firefighter from Paris. He lived through the heat wave of 2003, which killed nearly 20,000 people in France, and remembers the ten or so daily operations he carried out with his team to remove the corpses of old people who died alone in their homes. Baptiste had wondered how families do when they have to clean up afterwards… He will find the answer on his own when a 70-year-old uncle dies in his Parisian apartment, rue de la Roquette. The smell emanating from the rotting body had alerted the neighbors. And Baptiste found himself cleaning and clearing the three-room apartment. “The landlord gave me ten days. I didn't manage to make the place spotless. These images haunt me. »

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A year later, a new family drama: the wife of a cousin kills her two children and kills herself. Once again, he mopped up the blood of those close to him… In the meantime, he passed the forensic examination to become an “internal security criminalistician”. When the thriller "Cleaner" was released in the cinema, Baptiste recognized himself as Tom Cutler, alias Samuel L. Jackson, a former policeman who had become a "cleaner" of crime scenes. He matures his project. As the profession is not regulated in France, he left to train in Montreal. And, in 2017, he created Sang Froid. “Because you need it to do this job… and because we pick it up every day,” he pleads about this name, suggested by a friend, which he had trouble accepting.

“Chances are the tricks that the gods love to play on mortals,” writes the Uruguayan Carmen Posadas… On this sunny summer afternoon, I found him at his offices in Triel-sur-Seine (Yvelines), located in an old funeral marble, opposite the cemetery. A pleasant scent of eucalyptus floats in the hangar where Nasser and Romain prepare the equipment for an intervention. In a dozen blue plastic boxes, they store degreasers, brooms, scratch mops, sprayers, scraping sponges, microfiber cloths and window products. The day before, they finished late, busy cleaning out a cellar in which a man had hanged himself. The syndic had mandated a traditional company which canceled its visit at the last moment: none of the employees felt capable of carrying out this mission. Two and a half hours after being contacted, Baptiste, whose phone remains on 24 hours a day, landed with his collaborators.

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Today, they are working in an apartment in Poissy. Three days earlier, firefighters, alerted by worried parents, discovered a deceased young man on his bed. The boy drank a lot, everything suggests that he suffered a digestive haemorrhage. The exact cause of death, Baptiste does not know: “It does not concern us. Before the intervention, he went on site to meet the family and calculate an estimate. A summary briefing. "Better not to have too much information, to avoid making films", justifies Romain, who previously worked in the building industry.

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The smell of death is unlike any other. It soaks everything and persists for a long time

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The boss of Sang Froid introduces his team to the victim's mother, collects the keys and takes his leave. "No 'hello'," he warned us. There is never a good day when we intervene. No condolences, either. It would not be sincere, we do not know them and what they need is technical expertise. Already, Romain has started to put up the nylon tent in which they will discreetly equip themselves. The two technicians, dressed in black, without commercial flocking, put on their single-use full protective suit, overshoes and two pairs of gloves. The first is made of nitrile, a resistant rubber; the second, in elastane, cut resistant. In their bag, a third pair, in neoprene. Romain adjusts his goggles and his panoramic breathing mask with filter cartridges. A shell. “Breathe through your mouth,” Baptiste explains to me. It's not a test of guts… If you need to, we come out. I rush after him into the apartment. The stench is overwhelming. He warned: “The smell of death is like no other. It soaks everything and persists for a long time. An unvarnished wooden hammer, recovered from my uncle, still smelled after seven years…”

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I don't like cleaning... but we know why we act

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The two-piece seems to have been returned. On the coffee table in the living room, the leftovers of a Japanese meal, a can of Orangina, an electronic cigarette, telephone headphones. Next to the rotting fruit basket, the plastic gloves the medical examiner left behind and a body bag left by the funeral directors. “Nine times out of ten, plague Baptiste, they forget the medical waste. As the person is dead, they take the place for a garbage can. In the bedroom, the blood blackened on the mattress. Even the floor is sticky… Locked up in this closed place for a week, the body has decomposed, liquefied… Insects flutter along the floor. "I don't like cleaning... but we know why we act," insists Baptiste. The family will see nothing. » The duvet cover with pieces of scalp is collected, thrown in the yellow bin intended for waste from care activities with infectious risks which will be collected by a specialized company. Romain takes care of the bathroom and the kitchen. He throws away, cleans the dishes, empties the cupboards, washes the floor. Put personal items in a box. A life goes by: a permanent employment contract as a chef, sachets of spices, the framed reproduction of a drawing by Enki Bilal...

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I feel like I'm going to pass out, then I pull myself together with breathing exercises

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Baptiste plugs in the ozone disinfection machines that destroy bacteria and viruses. A pungent odor is added to the others. Four hours after their arrival, Romain and Nasser tackle the floorboards in the bedroom. The blood has seeped into it. The maggots which feed on the necrotic flesh take refuge there and abandon their blackish shell, the pupa, when they turn into flies. “If we don't remove them, the smell will persist,” asserts Romain. Short hair and a frank gaze, this 30-year-old man joined the company a year ago. You have to have a strong heart to do this job. "More than once, I thought to myself that I was not going to make it... I feel like I'm going to pass out, then I pull myself together with breathing exercises," he says. during the NeuroCoaching session organized in the clean pavilion of Baptiste.

Corinne Joubert, a former sophrologist in oncology and palliative care services, comes in every two months to help the team manage their emotions and stress. Together, they discuss difficult interventions. That day, Corinne offers them to talk about their biggest visual shock. Quickly, the discussion slips from smell to touch and hearing. Romain remembers a carpet of fly cocoons that creaked under his feet. "It really disgusted me," he says, emphasizing the impact of global warming, which accelerates the reproduction cycle of insects. "It's not natural, what you are doing," Corinne says. Before recovering: “Finally… Cleaning is natural. The protocol, the routine helps you overcome the sensory impact. The Sang Froid team is also regularly confronted with unsanitary housing occupied by people suffering from Diogenes syndrome, which makes them compulsively accumulate all sorts of objects and rubbish. Not long ago, a 30 square meter apartment had to be emptied and 450 100 liter bags of garbage had to be emptied from the fourth floor, without a lift. "It's really physical, I won't last until retirement", concludes Romain. He does it, he says, “for the families.”

Nasser recalls the first time he found himself alone in the face of distress. In wanting to hold back his son who had committed suicide in front of him with 28 stab wounds, a father had his hands slashed. “They were still bandaged when I saw him. Twenty-eight stab wounds… I struggled, I didn't know how to manage. At the time, I was a big coward. At the time of departure, their client thanked them with: "You are not expensive enough." Nasser, paid as a freelancer, earns between 2,000 and 3,000 euros net per month. Interventions are invoiced according to the time spent. In Poissy, the cleaning cost 2,100 euros; to this were added 1,600 euros for the “beautification” part, which consists of emptying the premises and replacing the parquet floor and windows. “In Canada,” Baptiste points out, “insurance pays for these services. In France, they barely reimburse part of the repair. He is fighting for decontamination to be included in the legal costs. He has been part of a working group led by the ministry since the end of 2019.

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These are the truths of the real world

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During the last videoconference, he also defended common sense measures: that people who live in an apartment soon to be sealed off can take enough belongings, because the procedures are long, and that they have the possibility of emptying garbage cans, fridge and freezer before the power goes out. “When I tell what we see, people are scared. Yet these are the truths of the real world. »

Last year, Sang Froid carried out 675 interventions, including 175 Covid disinfection, mainly in companies. The market is vast: Baptiste Girardet estimates at 55,000 the number of suicides, homicides and forgotten deaths that would require the intervention of professionals. He is currently negotiating with the SNCF to take charge of cleaning locomotives or station platforms when people throw themselves under a train. "The new generation of drivers refuses to work near human remains," he says. His family SME – he works with Aurélie, his wife, a former employee of a company selling disinfectant products – is doing well. He recruited two work-study trainees, Corentin, a business and marketing student, and Miguel, a BTS student in environmental services.

The latter discovered Sang Froid during a "job dating" organized by his establishment. “We were about ten cleaning companies. The others waited while a long line of curious students crowded in front of our stand,” jokes Baptiste. He admits to sometimes receiving "really creepy" resumes and cover letters. One of his first employees had confessed to him that he loved cleaning up blood. Baptiste Girardet preferred to part with it.