Former crime scene cleaner shares the call that stuck with him. It wasn’t gore, but a tragedy where the wife was still keening hours later

Trigger Warning: This story discusses suicide and extreme gore. Please read with caution

TikToker Gringo Furioso noted that when you work in a field as intense as crime scene cleanup, people always want to know the most gruesome details, and wild stories. However, for the creator who shares stories from his life on TikTok and YouTube, the reality is far more haunting than the gore. In a video that has reached 7.5 million views, he explains that it was the people who made one crime scene stick with him.

“I tell stories from my life, whether that be from my job as a former crime scene cleaner, of my life as an addict, or the time I spent in prison,” he told the viewers. The specific scene he was called to was a suicide, but he did not get details until he was 20-minutes away. That’s when he learned he was responding to a situation that had happened hours earlier. “We were informed that the wife who witnessed the event would [still] be there on the scene.”

“The awfulness started before I even got out of the truck, though. At the start, it sounded sort of like a tea kettle that was boiling, like a high-pitched whistle.” He even wondered if it was an ambulance. However, he knew the responders were gone, which is when he had a realization. “It was the woman whose husband had shot himself. She was wailing, keening, I think is what the Irish call it. Honestly, I can only describe it as the sound of pure grief.” 

He called it “The sound of total, absolute loss and emotional destruction”

Furioso noted, “That sound alone in itself, without ever having to go into the actual house, was enough to. To haunt me.” He then laid out some details about the incident: “They had been arguing in the living room, going back and forth. I believe that he had a history of putting his hands on her, shall we say. The argument reaches a sort of. of, you know, a fever pitch, a tipping point.” 

“And he goes into the back bedroom where he has a 4-10 double-barreled shotgun, comes back out to the living room, and instead of pointing it at her, puts it under his chin. And the last thing that he said to her was “fuck-you.” And then he was gone.”  

Furioso said that the cleanup was very difficult because the house had a popcorn ceiling. It was “was heavily cratered and impacted with blood and brains and bones. There were a lot of tiny little skull fragments.” He also provided some gruesome details, explaining, “Brain has a very weird quality of being both sticky and slippery at the same time.” He also noted that at high velocity, blood bounces and ricochets. Then he noted that the wife had a strange request,

“For whatever reason, her request was that we not scrape the popcorn ceiling right above where his head had been. Had we been able to, the job would have taken a lot less time. But I feel like it’s important to honor those types of requests, not just from a customer service standpoint, but as a crime scene cleaner. You are meeting somebody on the worst day of their life.” 

Furioso added, “So anything that I can do to take stress off of their plate and fulfill, even if it’s a silly request in my mind, if I can do something like that, I am performing a service that is so much more leaps and bounds ahead of thoughts and prayers or I’m sorry for your loss. And that’s honestly the reason why I did that job for so long is because nowhere else in my life had I been able to perform a service for somebody that was so meaningful.”

The internet has had a lot to say about his experience. However, the most striking responses came from the many first responders, and even one vet, who responded, sharing how they respond to similar questions. User krissy_wit_the_good_dogs, for instance, commented, “As a retired firefighter, it’s not the scenes themselves that haunt me, it’s the families reactions that stick with me.”

Crime scenes can be very chaotic for everyone involved. This includes the people who find the scene, like the Hikers in Big Sur who found a dead woman and a man who claimed to be her friend at an ‘atrocious’ scene. Or you could be a chaos maker, like the LA man who tried to steal an ambulance but was foiled by his pants.

Furioso ended on a high note, sharing that after he initially talked about the story on TikTok, someone close to the woman reached out to him. She told him that the woman is doing a lot better now and has remarried.