CriticalUM082808w Greg Dohler/The Gazette 8/25/08
Jim Boyd (left) and Morris Tucker of Critical Incident Clean-up.
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On the morning of July 4, a Bowie couple discovered their son's body lying lifeless on his bedroom floor.
Police, firefighters and EMTs arrived quickly, pronounced the 25-year-old man dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and investigated the scene. The coroners came around noon, put the body in a bag and left little puddles of blood when they carried it down the stairs.
The name on the card was James Boyd.
Boyd runs Critical Incident Clean-up, a company that was based in Upper Marlboro until it moved to Annapolis this summer. Since he started the company in 1994, Critical Incident has cleaned more than 700 scenes like the Williamses' home and arranged for contractors to repaint affected rooms, put in new carpet and flooring and fix any walls that might have been damaged by a hard fall or shotgun blast.
Boyd, who lives in Churchton, said he gets most of his calls from people in the aftermath of a suicide, but he also handles murders, accidents and unattended deaths. He said his company cleans up these scenes an average of once a week.
The Williamses said Boyd sent a team out an hour after they called him. Within a few days he sent people to put in new carpet and repaint the room—and he worked with their insurance company so they would not pay for any of it.
Boyd has worked out deals with the Fortune 15 insurance companies to cover his services. He has cleaned up for 758 families since then, and he said insurance payments usually pay for all of it. When they do not, he said, he often pays for the work himself or uses contractors who are willing to do repair work for free.
Boyd's network of supporters include Tommy's Auto Clinic in Upper Marlboro, which repairs his trucks for free, and Terrance Johnson, Maryland's assistant medical examiner, who has given families $2,000 up front for funeral expenses and let the families repay him at $20 a week. There are also about 40 police officers and other first responders who refer victims' families to Boyd.
Boyd sent the Williamses a condolence letter and a copy of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." The Williamses said he still calls occasionally to make sure they are all right, nearly two months after their son died.
"I didn't know people like Jim Boyd existed," Steven Williams said. "It put a lot of my faith back in humanity."
Boyd, who is a certified biohazard technician, said he and his nine-person staff make almost no profit. He invests any extra money back into the company and a staff member, Morris Tucker, said he is paid $300 for every clean-up he goes to. His staff members support themselves with other jobs, mostly as police officers, firefighters or paramedics.
Both Boyd and Tucker said they do this because of their religious convictions and because nobody else will. Boyd also has more personal reasons—his father committed suicide in 1994 and Boyd had to clean the apartment where he died.
Within a month, Boyd, who was then a police officer and volunteer emergency medical technician, had started Critical Incident.
Boyd said business has been steady over the years. But like any business, this one has cycles. It is harder in the summer months, he said, when bodies decompose quickly. But the company has the most calls between Thanksgiving and New Year's, when the suicide rate skyrockets.
It is the kind of work that can take a toll. Boyd has post-traumatic stress disorder from grisly scenes as an EMT, and he sometimes wakes up thinking he is at the scene of a suicide. He sees a therapist—the same one he refers clients to—but insists he has no plans of quitting.
"As long as I'm alive, [Critical Incident] will be here," he said. "It's a God thing."
As morbid as Boyd's services are, the Williamses said they are grateful for them.
"He made it a lot easier for us to move on with our lives," Steven Williams said. "If Jim asked me to do anything, I would do it."
