Two days after a man was shot dead in a Newhallville hallway, tenants were still walking past a pool of blood — until the city and neighbors stepped in.
The cleanup took place Friday afternoon at 128 Sheffield Ave., a three-family home in Newhallville where a man was killed Wednesday morning. Maurice Earls, 20, of New Haven, was found in the hallway at 4 a.m. suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, police said. He died shortly after.
More than two days later, a large pool of blood remained caked onto the wooden floor in the landing of the stairway, which leads up to the second- and third-floor apartments. The mess was posing a disturbing hazard for the woman on the third story, who has three kids under age 10, neighbors said: In order to get home, her family had to tiptoe around a crime scene.
The situation offered a question people don’t always think about after a murder: Who’s responsible for cleaning up the blood?
Several neighbors said they thought the victim’s family should be responsible, but the victim’s mom is still on her way back from Virginia.
The police department does not have anyone who cleans up crime scenes, police spokesman Joe Avery said. The duty falls to the landlord, he said.
In this case, the landlord was apparently out of the country.
So the job fell to Rafael Ramos, deputy chief of the city’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative. Ramos got a call Friday morning from Alderwoman Alfreda Edwards, who lives next door. She told him how children were being forced to walk by that crime scene, while the landlord was nowhere to be found.
Ramos first tried to track down the landlord, George Aseme. He called two numbers for Aseme but could not reach him. Aseme lives in the city and owns four properties here. He appears to be out of town, Ramos said: When LCI arrived at a scheduled inspection on one of Aseme’s other properties last week, the landlord didn’t show. Ramos said he thinks Aseme is on a trip to Africa. (Aseme couldn’t be reached for this story.)
Failing to find landlord or superintendent, Ramos showed up at the house at about 11:20 a.m. Friday. The yellow tape was gone. A small memorial (pictured) sat on the porch.
Police are still investigating the killing: They have made no arrests. They have reopened the scene of the crime. It was clear that nothing had been cleaned since crime scene investigators left. Four penciled boxes on the door marked spots where fingerprints had been removed.
Ramos opened the door to the stairway.
“That’s a lot of blood,” he remarked.
The sight was sickening. A few steps up, a memorial candle sat, burnt out. He tiptoed up the staircase and knocked on the second- and third-story apartments. No one was home.
“I can’t leave it like that,” Ramos said. “I got kids.”
“I’m going to clean that up,” he said. He jumped in his car and headed to the dollar store. He came back with a mop, scrub pads, two bottles of bleach, dish soap, a bucket, protective gear and an extra hand. LCI is trained in cleaning up blood-born pathogens, a city spokeswoman said.
City inspector Mark Stroud (pictured) of LCI put on big rubber boots and yellow overshoes. Ramos got into a white Tyvek suit. They set to work.
The task proved stomach-turning, and difficult. The blood was so caked into the floor that Ramos had to get an ice-scraper from a nearby car. Ramos sacrificed a towel from his car to clean the floor.
Soon, they needed a refill of water. That’s when neighbors started pitching in.
One supplied a spigot for water.
When Stroud rang her doorbell, Debra Fraser-Coleman, a neighbor across the street, gladly handed over four towels. She said her heart went out to her neighbors. She said the woman on the third floor can’t use the back stairs because there are no lights.
“It’s horrible,” Fraser-Coleman said. “Why she has to walk through that?”
“I don’t understand why it wasn’t cleaned up,” she added. She said she was glad she could help.
Back at the house, Ramos and Stroud kept scrubbing.
“Kids should not be coming home to a reminder” of a killing, Ramos said. “This is very traumatizing.”
“The next thing is to start helping people recover by getting rid of the reminders,” he said, as they scrubbed the door clean. “I want to get this out, just so they can start forgetting about it.”
Kimberly Edwards, who lives next door, gave Ramos a bottle of Ajax to finish the job.
Ripples of the tragedy hit her home, too.
Edwards, who’s 35, recounted how she had to shield her own son from the incident when they left for school Wednesday morning. The house next door was abuzz with police.
“I had to explain away the crime tape to my 6‑year-old,” she said.
“It’s crazy,” she said of the killing. “People don’t value life.”
After over an hour of scrubbing, Ramos announced that the children could come back to a clean home. He said the health department came by to clear the work after he finished. He called Alderwoman Edwards to tell her the job was done.
“He’s a hero,” remarked Edwards.
Meanwhile, friends remembered the victim, whose nickname is “Scooby,” in a sidewalk memorial at Thompson Street and Dixwell Avenue.
When he died Wednesday, Maurice Earls left behind a girlfriend who’s due to have a baby in the next two weeks, neighbors said.
“R.I.P. Scoobb,” read a piece of plyboard leaning against the fence. Nearby on the sidewalk sat a display: candles with pictures of a “guardian angel,” empty bottles of Remy Martin, and a five-dollar bill cut up into pieces and scattered across the ground.
Someone stuffed dollar bills into a bottle of Hennessey and placed it next to the candles.
“RIP Scooby,” read a note on one of the glass candle holders. “You will never be forgotten.”