#018 CAUSE OF DEATH - CRIME SCENE LIFE / Addiction - Mindset Special (1)

podcast_19594_causeofdeath_the_pdcst_with_marcell_engel_episode_352699_020_causeofdeath_crimescene_life_addiction_mindset_special_1-1.mp3

#020 Cause of Death: CRIME SCENE LIFE / Addiction - Mindset Special (1)

#020 Cause of Death: When addiction dominates our lives.

#020 Cause of Death: As a crime scene cleaner Marcell experiences again and again the fate of his customers and the course of life. In this episode he talks about a drug addict who completely destroys his own life and the lives of those around him in his intoxication. Terrible images that leave deep traces even for the experienced crime scene cleaner.

#020 Cause of Death: Cause of Death. The podcast with crime scene cleaner Marcell Engel. 

#020 Cause of Death: I see what moved people, how they lived and loved. And often I get a huge lesson from this. And that is a huge opportunity, namely to use precisely this lifes effect to improve one's own life.

#020 Cause of Death: Cause of Death. The Podcast with Marcell Engel.

Hello and welcome to a new episode of my podcast Cause of Death. I'm very happy to have you on it. Maybe you know this too. Sometimes there are situations in life where we make the decision to change something. This can be, for example, at the start of a new year, a special event in life. Positive or negative experiences that we experience, which cause us to go into a kind of life inventory. With some self-reflection, we then wish to change things and make good resolutions to do so. A few years ago, I received an order to clean and clear out a two-bedroom apartment. The landlord had a rented apartment in a typical multi-tenant housing estate. There were several units of flats with three or four house entrances and in each house entrance lived about eight tenants at a time in these units or flats. And then again meadow, small trees, sometimes a playground in between and then again, the next unit of flats, sidewalk, parking lots alongside the street and in the middle, there was the road. That's exactly how the situation looked to us at the time. So, we went on site. The assignment was the complete clearance. So, I went with my team on site, with four men. And we also received the information that the deceased was probably a drug addict and that the apartment was in an extreme state. And that is a question of: how do you perceive that for yourself? Sometimes we get an order, the situations are described. Yes, we would say that in the category 1 to 10 it's only a 2, so it's not too bad, but for other people it's already a neglected apartment.

Hello and welcome to a new episode of my podcast Cause of Death. I'm very happy to have you on it. Maybe you know this too. Sometimes there are situations in life where we make the decision to change something. This can be, for example, at the start of a new year, a special event in life. Positive or negative experiences that we experience, which cause us to go into a kind of life inventory. With some self-reflection, we then wish to change things and make good resolutions to do so. A few years ago, I received an order to clean and clear out a two-bedroom apartment. The landlord had a rented apartment in a typical multi-tenant housing estate. There were several units of flats with three or four house entrances and in each house entrance lived about eight tenants at a time in these units or flats. And then again meadow, small trees, sometimes a playground in between and then again, the next unit of flats, sidewalk, parking lots alongside the street and in the middle, there was the road. That's exactly how the situation looked to us at the time. So, we went on site. The assignment was the complete clearance. So, I went with my team on site, with four men. And we also received the information that the deceased was probably a drug addict and that the apartment was in an extreme state. And that is a question of: So, you can't always really put your money where your mouth is. The landlord was not there. The Kripo had the apartment locked and had determined the cause of death of the deceased. One question is always, as I said, what is the interpretation of the customer from us, from this information? So, with this tension we arrived on the spot. We did not really know what was coming to us and have perhaps expected the worse. We arrived on site, had the key, we unlocked the entrance to the house and on the next floor left and right was an apartment. However, these were much too narrow that we couldn't change in there. So, we decided to get ready downstairs, knowing that people might be a bit shocked. But you can explain to people what you're going to do. And that's how we did it. And because the deceased was suspected of drug use, we put on special gloves, special work protection, so that we wouldn't run the risk of endangering ourselves. Downstairs, dressed, on the first floor, people were already coming towards us. They were tenants, a man, a woman and a child.

And the man was already looking at me from the stairs, with such a grateful nodding look. According to the motto: Thank God that someone is finally here to solve the problem. But we didn't talk about anything else and he didn't ask anything either. I just said good morning and we continued upstairs and arrived on the second floor in front of the door. There was a white door frame, white door leaf, on the one handle the seal of the police to recognize, which was broken and on the other handle such a brown stain. I hadn't really thought about this stain at first. Then I unlocked the door and at first the door did not open properly. Then we pressed with force against the door and bam: The door opened up 90 degrees. We then visualized the full extent of this description of our customer and I can anticipate at this point: it was much worse than the man could probably ever have imagined. Even for me as an experienced crime scene cleaner, a picture opened up and I sensed a world of smells that almost knocked me off my feet. That was really crazy, because the apartment was full of trash. That's why we had to push open this door. So, there were two rooms, a hallway and then there was a bathroom, a toilet and a kitchen. It was completely filthy.

But not only that it was super messy. It also looked as if someone had committed a burglary in the garbage and had taken everything out. So, you can't even describe it. If you've ever been to a garbage dump, you just know that everything is crisscrossed. And that's more or less what it looked like. Partly in the corners up to a meter fifty high, the garbage stacked. But you could also see that the apartment itself was actually in the origin probably once a very cute, small, cozy, beautiful apartment, which was certainly also prepared with much love probably by the landlord, before the rental. There were walls, such beautiful stone walls and that was actually totally unusual for such an apartment. And as we then went into the apartment, it was quite dark, I had a flashlight, and really showed the whole extent there. So, it wasn't just that there was garbage on the floor. You couldn't even turn on a light switch because all over the walls these light switches were ripped out of the wall. I've never seen that before. And here it comes: there was shit smeared on the walls everywhere, really everywhere. Feces. And to such an extent that you knew you couldn't do that with one bowel movement. It was so extreme. And then I made up pictures in my mind. We have not yet found the place where the body was found.

So, I thought to myself: what's going on here? So, the sockets were all torn out, the switches were torn out. Then you saw that the wallpaper on one wall was torn down with plaster. The windows were smashed, the shutters, gray shutters, elements made of plastic, were torn out of their tracks and were still partly hanging down or completely out. The extent is unbelievable. I rarely see something like that. We then went from the hallway first into the bedroom, have checked the whole situation and then from there you could see the toilet. There it also looked pretty bad, I have never experienced something like this. Even the sinks were torn down from the wall. They were laying in such a heap of broken pieces on the floor. Probably water damage occurred at this point too. We also noticed that later when we were clearing out the apartment, because the garbage underneath was soaking wet in the last layer. So, at some point there was water damage and in time the water was probably turned off. Such a disaster. We then went into the living room. Then I saw the place where the body was found. The outline of a human being was clearly visible in the pile of garbage.

So, I thought to myself: The corpse laid there probably the whole summer for several weeks on this pile of garbage. Accordingly, you could find maggots everywhere. So, if you looked at the place where the corpse was found and this outline, you could see a biomass, a brownish one, and the maggots were wallowing in it. Yes, hundreds of them were feasting on the corpse. The corpse was no longer there, but the biomass was. And that's what they feed on. From the living room, we went back into the kitchen. The kitchen also an absolute disaster case. This amount of fecal pollution I have not seen even with people who have a compulsive action. We have an aid organization that cooperates with us in this regard and brings such people into an assisted living facility. And then there's always the situation that we remove the shit from the walls, because they smear their own excrement on the walls in the forced action. People are sick, that's just the way it is, and that's what we do, and basically no one harms the other. But I don't want to judge that at all.

Then the neighbor came to us and told us a lot. He told us there were wild drug parties, then he wasn't there for days or weeks. He was probably in Frankfurt, somewhere in the drug milieu, and then he got his dope and lived on the street and then, when he came home again, he brought ten people with him. There were probably very abnormal, excessive parties and he and the neighbors suffered extremely from it. And then he told me that the neighbor, whom I had met before, was also always exhausted with the child, because whenever he came upstairs and his little one, who was always playing on the lawn downstairs, yes, then explain that to the child when someone stumbles up the stairs in such a state of intoxication. Yes, explain that to your child when your child asks you what's going on with the man. So, I thought to myself as a family man: I would go crazy. But thank God, I didn't live there. And nevertheless, I felt extremely sorry for the neighbors based on the crime scene, what I could see and what I could read from it, what had happened there over the months. I also felt sorry for the landlord.

Then the neighbor came to us and told us a lot. He told us there were wild drug parties, then he wasn't there for days or weeks. He was probably in Frankfurt, somewhere in the drug milieu, and then he got his dope and lived on the street and then, when he came home again, he brought ten people with him. There were probably very abnormal, excessive parties and he and the neighbors suffered extremely from it. And then he told me that the neighbor, whom I had met before, was also always exhausted with the child, because whenever he came upstairs and his little one, who was always playing on the lawn downstairs, yes, then explain that to the child when someone stumbles up the stairs in such a state of intoxication. Yes, explain that to your child when your child asks you what's going on with the man. So, I thought to myself as a family man: The man had bought the apartments as a pension hedge and then something like this happens. There you are the landlord, trying to somehow secure your life pension and then you have a problem such as this. Nevertheless, of course, the victim who has been killed must also be taken into account. That's also a rough number. I mean, the man lost the most valuable thing in his life, which he has, namely his lifetime and his life as such. That under dedication of an addiction.

Then the neighbor came to us and told us a lot. He told us there were wild drug parties, then he wasn't there for days or weeks. He was probably in Frankfurt, somewhere in the drug milieu, and then he got his dope and lived on the street and then, when he came home again, he brought ten people with him. There were probably very abnormal, excessive parties and he and the neighbors suffered extremely from it. And then he told me that the neighbor, whom I had met before, was also always exhausted with the child, because whenever he came upstairs and his little one, who was always playing on the lawn downstairs, yes, then explain that to the child when someone stumbles up the stairs in such a state of intoxication. Yes, explain that to your child when your child asks you what's going on with the man. So, I thought to myself as a family man: Life impact.

Now, of course, this is an extremely hard case, an absolutely exceptional case. And everyone who hears this, or who watches it, or has seen it knows, or thinks that something like this could probably never happen to me personally. And then I thought to myself: well, of course that's an extreme case. But what about our small or even larger life addictions? Doesn't each of us have some form of addiction? And if so, to what extent does it have a negative influence on our lives and pull us further and further down into this vortex, into this whirlpool of addiction? And that doesn't necessarily have to be something like a substance, like drugs. Some people will say that it doesn't affect me at all. I have alcohol under control, cigarettes bother many. But what about the other things? What about the Internet, cell phones, excessive sports, eating the wrong foods, and maybe working too much or gambling? These are all things that are known to us.

Now, of course, this is an extremely hard case, an absolutely exceptional case. And everyone who hears this, or who watches it, or has seen it knows, or thinks that something like this could probably never happen to me personally. And then I thought to myself: And sometimes it's just the little things that have a negative impact on our lives and we can't even recognize it in time. Every type of addiction initially represents a certain imbalance within us. And this imbalance is balanced by what we consume at the time of our personal addiction. And this in turn creates a reward principle. Something happens biochemically in us. And accordingly, we still believe that this is good for us. Sometimes we can tell by the amount of time we spend with our little addictions that it's not going right. And sometimes, of course, when it directly affects us physically, we know anyway that it's not good for us. I think it's important to think about this from time to time, to engage in self-reflection. What are my little addictions in life? Are they really still good for me at that moment, the way we pretend they are? Is it really the case that perhaps the measure of things has not been exceeded or that a certain proportionality is simply no longer as it should be? And that is precisely the point. Many things in life that we consume or practice every day are perhaps sometimes out of proportion, out of balance.

And then we think about it. The occasion, as I said, can be the start of a new year, for example. And I really wish you and everyone else that we ourselves are in a position not only to make a decision, to focus on changing something, but that we really succeed in doing so. And that is the thought with which I would like to say goodbye to you now. Always remember: everything in life has its proportionality. So, find your inner balance and don't let the small life-addictions or also bigger life-addictions gain the upper hand with you. In this sense: clean up your life. I wish you good health in the coming year and a good start, that you succeed in everything you have planned, that everything you have wished for comes true. And yes, if you liked the episode, then very happily subscribe to my channel. I'm also on Instagram and Facebook. You can find all that in the show notes. And otherwise, this special Mindset episode, will also be available once a month in the future not only as a podcast, but as a YouTube video. “Crime Scene Life”. And this one is called “Crime Scene Life Addiction”. So, feel free to watch it. In addition, you get the real pictures that I just told here in the podcast. So very happy if you subscribe to these channels as well and I look forward to us being together on more stories and yes, living through my experiences of the crime scene cleaner together. Until then, ciao, your Marcell

And then we think about it. The occasion, as I said, can be the start of a new year, for example. And I really wish you and everyone else that we ourselves are in a position not only to make a decision, to focus on changing something, but that we really succeed in doing so. And that is the thought with which I would like to say goodbye to you now. Always remember: Cause of Death. The podcast with crime scene cleaner Marcell Engel. The Mindset Edition. Be part of it. I'm looking forward to it. Subscribe to the season and you'll never be late for an episode.