Service work can be stressful at times, and sometimes you might even be expected to go above and beyond your normal duties. What one housekeeper at a resort in Wisconsin didn’t realize was that her management would have to clean up something absolutely gut-wrenching — a suicide. A woman staying in one of the hotel rooms had attempted “and possibly accomplished” ending her life, and “the scene was quite graphic in terms of bodily fluids and crime scene evidence laying around,” according to the 18-year-old housekeeper.
The Hotel Didn’t Hire Professionals for the Cleanup But Put It on Housekeeping
“I’ve never been trained in crime scene cleanup, the most I’ve done as a housekeeper is spot clean blood drops off of sheets or towels,” she explained. However, “this was a whole different situation entirely.” The managers did help with some of the cleaning, but the majority of the scrubbing and disposing of bloody towels and sheets were forced on the young housekeeper and her co-worker. Doing something as traumatizing as that at work definitely took a toll on their mental health, but their compensation was anything but acceptable. “All my manager did was fist bump me afterwards,” she recalled.
The incident left the poor employee feeling “incredibly anxious and nauseous,” making it hard to work in the days after. “Even when I’m not at work, I have been struggling to eat or sleep,” she described in their Reddit post on the suicide cleanup. Besides venting their frustration on the whole ordeal, the housekeeper asks other online users if she can potentially sue their workplace for making them go through such an awful experience. Fortunately, there does seem to be hope that she’ll get properly compensated.
According to the most upvoted comment, she could file a claim for mental health since she’s been developing a negative condition after the incident. Another person points out how it should have been a professional’s responsibility to clean up the scene: “The cops meant it was the hotel’s responsibility to HIRE a professional crime scene cleaning company, not that it was up to housekeeping. I would have a serious talk with your boss about how that all transpired because that is ridiculous that you had to deal with that.”
Hopefully, the housekeeper will contact OSHA and be compensated by her workplace for what happened, as well as recover from her PTSD from the crime scene.
