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In the 14 years AAA Crime Scene Steam & Clean llc has been in business we have had a lot of Media Attention. Newspapers, Magazines, TV.     Photographed by Robert Yager www.laweekly.com Six years ago, a friend of mine in Chicago had a friend who shot himself, and one of the things he had to deal with was how to clean up. I thought, this is something a family should never have to do, and when they asked me to come over and help, I did. When I got back to California in 1994, I checked around to see whether anyone else was doing it. I was astonished that no one was. I always had an entrepreneurial kind of bent, so I started a business. Some of the jobs really get to us, especially the ones that involve children, or the ones that are particularly senseless. Most of our jobs involve suicides, and sometimes you’re standing there just like the family, saying, “My God. This person had everything. What would drive them to this?” Sometimes the jobs are just really, really, really gross, like a lot of blood and body fluids. One time we had to go into this house that was a trash house. The guy was still alive in the house, but he hadn’t had plumbing for three years. All of the toilets were full; he was using the bathtub as a toilet and also defecating in the backyard in piles. That job took us two 10-hour days. Every job we do is a biohazard, and the State of California considers what we clean up medical waste. There are a lot of physical dangers — Hepatitis B and C, meningitis, tuberculosis — so we go into a job wearing Tyvek® water-repellant suits. We’re protected head to toe, and everybody has their shots. I worry more about the emotional effects of the job than the physical hazards. We always have a debriefing at the end of the day when we can all talk about what we saw and shake out the cobwebs. I have a crew, and I have crew chiefs, and when I start burning out on a job, I just send my crew chiefs out and take a break. And if it gets to them, I do the same thing. But there’s also a lot of satisfaction in this work. You have a really positive, immediate impact on someone’s horrible situation. When we’re on a job, there’s nobody in the world they want to see more than us, but once we’re done, they never want to see us again.         www.maximonline.com Maxim, October 1998 by David Jacobson CRIME SCENE CLEANER “Shotguns are very, very messy,” explains Kathie Jo Kadziauskas, the owner of Ventura, California–based Crime Scene Steam and Clean. Kadziauskas knows. A former sales rep and United Parcel Service driver, Kadziauskas found her calling by helping a friend whose boyfriend took himself out of the running for Social Security benefits with a 12-gauge. “At the time,” she says, “I couldn’t imagine anything worse than a shotgun. Later, of course, I found out that wasn’t completely true.” Four years back, Kadziauskas was one of the very first practitioners in the new business of postmortem mop-ups. Before entrepreneurs like her, shocked and grieving family and friends in homicide and suicide cases had to break out the sponges themselves. Now, as Kadziauskas notes, “the coroner takes the big pieces…and all the little stuff is ours.” Forget high tech: For Kadziauskas, leadership in this field means creeping on hands and knees through gore-spattered rooms while wielding a scrub brush and germ-killing solvents. It means digging skull fragments out of walls, scraping brain matter off ceilings, and checking behind venetian blinds—where she once found a rifle suicide’s ear stuck to a window. Last year Kadziauskas worked three days straight on a single shotgun blast that somehow spread body bits through five rooms. One of the big challenges in this business is “decomps,” as Kadziauskas calls her many cases of corpses gone undiscovered for days or weeks. Sure, most of the remains have been taken away before she arrives. But carpets and mattresses are often saturated with bodily fluids that feed broods of “big, fat white maggots,” according to Kadziauskas. At one double-murder decomp, the flies were so thick on the windows, she says, “I thought there was a shade down.” Worst of all is the odor, which can only be removed by a days-long process of “bombing” the premises with a fine mist of chemical deodorant. But at $200 to $275 an hour, a cost typically covered by homeowner’s insurance, removing the stench of death can yield a tidy profit. “From a practical, business point of view, I’d like to have a lot more decomps,” says Kadziauskas. Don’t get the wrong idea. Kadziauskas is plenty sensitive to her clients. Besides cutting deals with the uninsured, she guides survivors’ reentry into affected rooms, helping them get over the added shock of missing ceiling tiles. As for her own psyche, she claims she is not overwhelmed by her macabre labors. After most jobs, she and her crew go out to eat: “We almost never eat before,” she says. Pacific Coast Business Times Oct 28th/Nov3rd 2005 Vol6#33 Skinny Magazine Dec 2005 NEWS PAPERS: 1. The Star..West County Edition Sun.Dec27th 1998 Bryan Boetiger :" After the Police Leave,who cleans up?" 2. LA Times..Ventura County Edition Tue Aug.15th 2000 David kelly " Easing the Trauma" 3. Riverside Business Journal Thur Nov 18th 1999 Daniel Jennings " Odd Jobs" 4. The News Observer Wens Sept 4th 1996 AP of Wall Street Journal   5. Los Angeles Times Tue July 25th 2000 Solomon Moore "Slaying 2 bodies found"   6. Ventura Journal vol3#52 Dec 31st 1999 Betty Rose " Odd Jobs"   7. LA Weekly Jan 5-11th 2001   8. Wall Street Journal Thur Aug 29th 1996 Manny Fernandez "It's a dirty job that must be done when some one dies"   9. Ventura County Star Sun Oct. 6th 1996 Steve Chawkins " Cleaning up where Angeles fear to Scrub"   10. Los Angeles Times Solomon Moore  Crime Beat "Companies Clean Up at Crime Scene"   11. The Austrilan Finical Review Thur. Sept 19 1998 Eric Ellis " It's a Crime if you can't Clean Up in this Industry"   Magazines:   1. Maxim  Dec 1998 "Crime Scene Cleaner"   2. Jane Oct. 2001 Sue Carpenter " Fly on the Wall"   3. Mini World Japan Oct/Nov. 2001 Keith Strandberg " Crime Scene Clean Up"   4. FHM May 1998 Caroline Rees " Crime Scene Cleaners"   5. Law Enforcement Technology March 1998 Keith Strandberg " Crime Scene Clean Up"   6. Todays Insurance Woman  Nov/Dec 1996 vol53#6 Stephanie W "Its a Tough Job,but some one has to do it." 7. Corrections Forum Jan/Feb 1998 "Cleaning Up Crime"   8. Law Enforcement Technology Aug 2000 Keith Steandberg " Crime Scene Do Not Cross"   9. Maintance Supply March 1998 vol43 Keith Strandberg " Crime Scene Clean Up"   TV   BBC Documentary Day & Date Court TV Odd Jobs