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One gory job -- mortuary affairs personnel for the Marine Corps. -- just led to another -- Biotrauma, Inc., a death scene cleaning service.
Gainsville, GA-based Biotrauma is a firm specializing in the decontamination and restoration of suicide, homicide, and natural death scenes for families who have experienced a traumatizing incident in the home.
It's the epitome of dirty work that somebody has to do.
The service is the brainchild of Benjamin Lichtenwalner and Ryan Sawyer two Marines who saw the grisly worst during a tour on the Iraq battlefield in 2003.
But their work isn't just about removing what can be grisly remains at suicide, homicide, and natural death scenes.
"In Iraq, we became seasoned in dialogue with people who were emotionally distraught. Units that incurred a casualty would often times assign an escort for the remains, and that escort would typically be a good friend of the deceased and someone who we would encounter frequently during the course of our work," says Lichtenwalner.
Sawyer likens the work to his experience in Iraq - maintaining on-call readiness at all hours of the night: "When remains were recovered from the field and sent to our location for documentation, it would most likely happen at night to avoid enemy rocket-fire."
The two Marines gained a deep reverence for the deceased after having performed countless "flight-line ceremonies" as they loaded human remains on aircrafts for transport.
Biotrauma's Marines say 80 percent of all incidents are cleaned up by the families themselves, and that public awareness must be increased to prevent exposing families to that level of psychological stress.
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