On a cool Friday morning in February, four Xtreme Cleaners employees dressed in white Tyvek suits, rubber boots, latex gloves and face masks are ready to work.
As Business Report details in a feature from the current issue, their job begins in the driveway of an elderly woman’s south Baton Rouge home. She is a hoarder and this is the team’s second trip to her home. On their first visit, they spent 16 hours cleaning and removed 44 bags of trash. This time will be quicker. Four more hours and they should be finished.
They grab white rags, large black trash bags and disinfectant spray from a white trailer parked in the driveway.
A cousin of the homeowner, who prefers not to be named, hired the company after she discovered the filthy home and her relative’s declining health.
“I knew it was going to be bad, but I never thought it would be this bad,” she says. “When I got here, I didn’t know where to start. There were piles of dishes with bugs everywhere. And there was old gravy caked inside the console of her car. It was nasty.”
She called Xtreme Cleaners, a Prairieville-based company that specializes in all things nasty. They clean up what they deem “unfortunate situations.” Homicides, suicides, meth labs and hoarding homes are their specialties.
“Bio is short for biohazard and includes blood, brain matter, feces, urine, anything that comes from a body,” says Larry Douglas, the 51-year-old president and CEO of Xtreme Cleaners. “We clean all of that up, and we make sure we do a thorough job. We don’t ever want a family to return to their home and move a piece of furniture or a carpet and find bio material or a body fragment.”
Xtreme Cleaners has cleaned up many high profile crime scenes, including the vehicles involved in last summer’s police ambush that claimed the lives of three officers on Airline Highway, local television personality Scott Rogers’ 2014 murder/suicide, and the 2015 shooting of a deputy U.S. marshal at a Baton Rouge motel, among others.
“If you go back and look at every major news story that has happened over the past few years,” Douglas says, “we’ve probably had a hand in cleaning it up.”
They also cleaned the Raising Cane’s River Center after it housed thousands of flood evacuees for more than a month last summer. And the company routinely handles scenes that don’t get a lot of media attention but are no less tragic. One such job included cleaning up a local hotel room after a man drank himself to death inside. Another required retrieving and disposing of a bloated dead dog from a pond in an apartment complex. But it’s the jobs involving children that are the hardest, says Douglas.
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