RELEASE: Statement from Town and Gown Players

ATHENS (MyFOX ATLANTA) - The three people we lost yesterday were a part of the rich 50-year history of this theater and, more than that, were vital members of the Town and Gown family.

Ben Teague, loving husband of UGA's Dr. Fran Teague for more than 40 years, was not only a friend but also a father figure to all at the theater. One would be hard pressed to find a Town and Gowner who had not learned at least one life lesson from this wise and kind hearted man. His wife wishes to say, "Yesterday Ben was murdered, which is hard to comprehend and impossible to accept. It was a beautiful day, however, and he was in his favorite place with the people he loved." Ben was a translator of German, Russian and English.

Marie Bruce was the binding force that held the Town and Gown community together. Having worked with Town and Gown for over 20 years, at one time or another she served in every capacity at the theater, artistically and administratively, from leading lady to president of the board to chief cook and bottle washer. A local attorney, Marie was the mother of two young children.

A gentle presence, Tom Tanner breathed life into every corner of Town and Gown through his quiet diligence and astounding creativity - most would call him genius. Father of an equally amazing daughter, Tom would tell you that while he enjoyed his work as director of the Regional Dynamics Economic Modeling Laboratory at Clemson University, his heart lived and thrived in the theater.

Ben, Marie and Tom were a part of our family, and as painful as their loss is for us, we know it is even more painful for their families. We want to extend our deepest sympathy to their immediate family and close friends outside the theater community. There are no words we can use to adequately express our grief.

We would like to thank the Athens Police department and the media for their respectful treatment of this tragedy. We want to thank the American Bio Recovery Association and A1 BIO-Clean Service for the generous donation of their services in our time of need. We also want to thank the Athens Community for their support. This tragedy effects everyone in the community in some way, and we know you share in our loss. We ask that the media continue to be respectful of our privacy during this difficult time.

Custodian’s stress-disorder suit restored

Meghann M. Cuniff / Staff writer
The Spokesman-Review

A custodian who sued her school district after being forced to clean up the bloody scene of a student’s suicide had her lawsuit reinstated Tuesday by the Washington Court of Appeals.

Debbie Rothwell, who still works at Lakeside High School in Nine Mile Falls, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a lawsuit filed in May 2007 by her lawyer, William Powell, of Spokane. The 16-year-old student shot himself in the head inside the school’s main entrance in 2004. The lawsuit was dismissed in January 2008 by Spokane County Superior Court Judge Greg Sypolt, who ruled the incident was covered by the Industrial Insurance Act.

But the Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling, disagreed and reinstated the suit.

“There are people who do clean up the mess after one of these horrible murders or suicides happen,” Powell said Tuesday, referring to private professionals. “But the superintendent in this case chose not to do that. He should have known better.”

Along with former Superintendent Michael Green, now superintendent of the Woodland School District in Western Washington, the lawsuit names the Nine Miles Falls School District, Stevens County Sheriff Craig Thayer, two sheriff’s detectives and an unidentified man as defendants.

None was available for comment. Like most civil suits in Washington, the complaint seeks unspecified damages.

Rothwell’s complaints center around her task of cleaning up the suicide scene, then being asked to move a backpack she later learned belonged to the victim and contained a suspicious device that authorities detonated using a robot.

She stayed at work until after 4 a.m., cleaning the mess of blood, brain and bone alone, becoming “emotionally distraught and physically ill” before returning to the school less than four hours later at Green’s orders to serve cookies and coffee to grieving students and keep the media from the school, according to the suit.

At issue in the court decisions was whether Rothwell’s claim of post-traumatic stress disorder fell under the industrial injury act, which prohibits lawsuits based on industry injury or occupational disease.

Judges John A. Schultheis and Dennis J. Sweeney ruled it didn’t because it wasn’t the result of one work order. Her trauma grew over several days, according to their written opinion. Judge Teresa C. Kulik dissented.

A grisly business

Sometimes it's gruesome. Often it's traumatic. But someone has to clean up after murders. In America one woman and her team are glad to help. Julian Borger on the squad in white suits who see it all

The scene is familiar from a thousand cop shows and news bulletins. The chalk outline where the body lay. Yellow tape marking off the scene, and the flashing red lights as the ambulance pulls away. But what we never see is what happens next. In the wake of each brutal murder or desperate suicide, who stays behind to clear up the mess?
That is what Becky Della-Rodolfa wanted to know when a policewoman friend described a particularly nasty day at work on the troubled streets of Philadelphia.

"I said: 'Did you clean it up?'," Della-Rodolfa recalls. "She laughed at me, and she said: 'Are you kidding? The family cleans it up.' And that seemed so sad to me."

Sad, and commercially intriguing. Della-Rodolfa had a business degree and had had enough working for a government debt recovery department, sending in the bailiffs to bankrupt small enterprises. Here was the chance of filling a market niche, being her own boss, and perhaps sparing bereaved families some agony along the way.

Less than four years later, she is one of the partners in Trauma Scene Restoration, with up to 17 workers on call, ready to don white bio-hazard suits, gloves and rubber gas masks, and do what no one else is prepared to do. They will mop up the blood, scrape away human tissue, rip up floorboards, knock through walls, and restore everything until you would never guess anyone had died.

In Britain this unpleasant task is normally carried out by the police, but in the US, with a much higher rate of violent crime, the police are increasingly unwilling to handle more than they strictly need for evidence. So an industry is emerging to fill the gap, with more than 200 firms across the nation. The burgeoning business now has its own lobby group, the American Bio-Recovery Association (ABRA). It held its first convention in September in Las Vegas, where bio-recovery entrepreneurs schmoozed, swapped grisly tales and agreed to push Washington towards legislating federal standards. "We want to be regulated like any other industry," says Ron Gospodarski, ABRA's president. He is worried about the spread of cowboy outfits with no training and no safety regulations, who bulldoze their way into the homes of bereaved families.

Della-Rodolfa calls them "bleach-bottle companies" because "they just pour bleach over everything". Trauma Scene Restoration uses more sophisticated chemicals and enzymes. They arrive on the scene in a discreet white van, whereas the nearest competition in Baltimore parks outside in a bright red lorry emblazoned with the words: Crime Scene Cleanup. Unsurprisingly, the press are seldom far behind.

The delicate dilemma facing Trauma Scene Restoration was how to avoid being so crass, yet spread the word that the service existed. As Justin Jaconi, one of the company's white-suited cleaners, puts it: "What are we gonna say? 'If you die - call us?' It's one of those things - if you hear about it you hope you never have to use it."

In the end the new firm opted to place an advertisement in the Yellow Pages under house-cleaning, and Della-Rodolfa goes to police detectives conventions cvarrying golf tees inscribed with the firm's slogan - Restoring The Scene And Peace of Mind. "A lot of detectives and medical examiners play golf," she explains. This year, the firm is even sponsoring a police golf tournament.

Once ABRA has established itself, Della-Rodolfa expects it to start winning the big contracts - universities, hotel chains, the US postal service (in recent years a byword for murderous rampages by disgruntled employees) - who need a company they can trust on standby, to make the mess disappear in the event of "incidents".

Everyone in this business could spend all day reciting from the litany of horror stories which constitute their careers. If it isn't nasty they don't get called. Ron Gospodarski was summoned one night by a New York fast-food restaurant. There had been an argument in the queue. Someone got shoved and returned with a gun to shoot four people dead.

"There were blood smears along the walls and bullet holes everywhere, but the restaurant owner got us in straight away. As the medical examiners got through with each section, we moved in there, and the place was open the next day," he says.

Last week, Trauma Scene's van was outside a two-storey white house in south Philadelphia. A 300lb man, a recluse, had died in his home surrounded by the grimy bric-a-brac he had been buying from flea-markets for the past 15 years. There was plumbing, welding equipment, televisions and unidentifiable junk piled up to the ceiling in every room. The house was filthy and a pack of cats roamed at will.

By the time Della-Rodolfa reached the scene, the cats had gone and the main challenge was an infestation of maggots and cockroaches. She had to open the refrigerator, throw an insecticide canister in like a hand grenade and slam the door shut. "That was a screamer," she says, shivering at the memory.

Outside on the street, Justin Jaconi, a former demolition worker who by now is a 19-year-old veteran of putrid human debris, is talking about how to deal with the psychological hurdles involved in the job. He says: "You can't sit there and think: 'Well that sucks for that person'. If you sit there and think about it, you're going to get yourself into a bad situation."

The main challenge is to avoid either vomiting or weeping. On one of her first jobs, Della-Rodolfa started crying uncontrollably. "I just started looking at pictures of the family. The others were looking and telling me: 'Stop crying' but I just couldn't. I started to personalise it. Now I try not to look at the pictures. If they're tempting you, take them off the wall and turn them upside down."

Can there be possibly be a worse job anywhere? Della-Rodolfa does not see it that way. Firstly, Trauma Scene Restoration turned a small profit in its first year - unusual for a new small business. But more importantly, she insists, she is providing a service people desperately need at their worst imaginable moments.

"How can you walk away from the scene when the family is begging you for help? One of the first jobs I was on, the mother just hugged me for 10 minutes and kept telling me: 'You're like an angel.' People always ask me: 'How could you do it?', but it's more like 'How could you not?'"

Cleanup completed at Civic Association

April 5, 2009

Cleanup has been completed at the American Civic Association building in Binghamton, where a gunman killed 13 people and injured four before taking his own life Friday.

The American Bio-Recovery Association, a non-profit international association of crime and trauma scene professionals, said Sunday that the bio-recovery cleaning was complete. The Ipswich, Mass.-based group provided the service at no cost.

Two member companies, Disaster Clean Up of Endwell and the Bio-Recovery Corporation of New York City, donated labor and supplies to remediate the scene with a crew of six technicians.

Bio-Recovery Corporation Aids In Binghamton Crime Scene Cleanup

PRESS RELEASE
April 5th 2009

Bio-Recovery Corporation of New York City and Diaster Scene Cleanup of Endwell, NY responded to the American Civic Association on April 5th 2009 at the request of the American Bio-Recovery Association to aid the American Civic Association and the entire Binghamton community with the cleanup of the crime scene left in the aftermath of Fridays multiple homicide, suicide at their offices located at 131 Front St Binghamton, NY.

At the request of Dale Cillian, President of the non profit American Bio-Recovery Association (ABRA), the two named companies above provided all the labor and equipment to complete this cleanup in one day at no cost to the American Civic Association. "I couldn't have done this without you guys," stated Andrew Baranoski, Executive Director of the non-profit American Civic Association.

The American Bio Recovery Association, an international association of Crime & Trauma Scene Cleanup professionals strives to make these services available to all that require it throughout the United States.