The New York Times-20080127-After the Tragedy- the Tidying Up

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After the Tragedy, the Tidying Up

Full Text (719  words)[Author Affiliation] More Dispatches: nytimes.com/cityroom

THE phones were quiet Wednesday morning at the narrow office of Bio-Recovery Corporation, in a sign-less brick building opposite Calvary Cemetery in Long Island City, Queens. Every so often, a dot-matrix printer with a bad ribbon ticked off a bulletin from somewhere in the region -- *Overturned Auto* Linden Blvd and Kings Highway -- but these weren't the kind of calls that Ron Gospodarski and Manny Sosa were waiting for.

In the bluntest terms, they were waiting for someone to die. Mr. Gospodarski, the president of Bio-Recovery, and Mr. Sosa, his only full-time employee, spend much of their time cleaning up trauma scenes, places where people have been killed, or killed themselves, or just died in a messy way. After the police have left and the body has been removed -- or, as Mr. Gospodarski put it, the big part is gone -- is when they go to work, cleaning up whatever is left.

On Jan. 1, a new city law took effect that requires first responders to tell the often-shocked people at a home or another trauma scene about clean-up methods, and to refer them to a Web site for information about financial aid and about companies like Mr. Gospodarski's.

Owing, perhaps, to a certain voyeurism in human nature, Bio-Recovery has had much attention from the news media. Nevertheless, when people need help, they often think they must tackle the grim cleanup themselves, and Mr. Gospodarski hopes the new law will change that.

All I wanted from our perspective, honestly, was to make the city agencies inform people that there's people out there who can help them -- if they choose, he said.

His company, which also cleans up mold, human waste and the like, used to advertise in the Yellow Pages. But the work is hard to describe. We listed ourselves under housecleaning, he said. And to this day, we get calls, people saying, 'Do you do housecleaning?' And I say, 'What kind of housecleaning do you mean?'

Mr. Gospodarski has been a paramedic for 26 years, and he was an operations manager in the Queens district attorney's office for six years. Mr. Sosa worked there too, processing crime scene photographs, and has been with Bio-Recovery for eight years. Which is to say, they have seen just about everything, and gotten used to it.

Between the two of them, this comes out as gallows humor that can be unsettling. But sometimes, for distraught families amid the aftermath, they are the perfect people to confide in; they will not be shocked, and they do not judge. Death, Mr. Gospodarski said, is a great equalizer.

This all has a way of setting them apart, in an American culture that prefers not to look at such things directly. I don't really speak about my job to people, Mr. Sosa said. As soon as I leave here, I leave my job here. All my friends know what I do, and they really don't want to hear that.

Some days are slow, but not all. Early in January, at the end of the typically busy holiday season, the two men worked 32 hours straight. Late January is usually a busy time for suicides, too. Mr. Gospodarski has heard it is linked to the arrival of credit card bills.

Neither man revels in this. Mr. Sosa still is bothered by talking to the families, or by scenes that involve children. As the two men watch the silent phones, they are not rooting for anyone to die, just accepting that it will happen.

In the afternoon, they took a spin into Manhattan to pick up boxes of sheets, stained with blood and other biological matter, from a Midtown hotel. Work like this, and cleaning up city buses that have been used as toilets, provide a steady income on even the quiet days.

As they entered Manhattan, Mr. Gospodarski tapped his hands impatiently on the steering wheel. In this big city, nobody's killing nobody today, he muttered. It's too cold.

After the hotel job, they headed back to the office. Soon, Mr. Gospodarski's pager was blinking with an automated bulletin about an out-of-town shooting. Oh, he said with a shrug as he set down the pager. Gunshot wound to the hand.

[Illustration]PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT STOLARIK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)