The Man Who Cleans Up After Plane Crashes

Robert Jensen has spent his career restoring order after mass fatalities: identifying remains, caring for families, and recovering personal effects. Here’s how he became the best at the worst job in the world.
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A team stumbled and hacked its way through the jungle. The group had a vague idea of where they were headed and what they would find there. Days before, search planes flying high above the Andean foothills had spotted the debris of a crashed helicopter dotting a steep, rocky slope. Reaching the tangled mess would be impossible from the air, so the team had set off on foot.

Leading the group as it trudged through the undergrowth was Robert Jensen, a tall, mighty man in a white helmet with “BOB” scrawled in marker on the forehead. It had taken two days of bushwhacking to reach the site. Six days later, Jensen would be the last man to leave. It was Jensen whom the Rio Tinto mining group, which had chartered the helicopter to carry employees from a Peruvian copper mine to the city of Chiclayo, had reached out to first. It was Jensen who had worked out a strategy for reaching the crash site after it became clear that the ten people aboard had been killed, the debris blasted across the wanton ridges of a tropical Yosemite. Jensen assembled the team: two Peruvian policemen, two investigators, several forensic anthropologists, and a group of park rangers accustomed to climbing for search-and-rescue missions. They all knew this wasn’t going to be a rescue mission.

Robert Jensen stands alongside boxes of personal effects at Kenyon’s warehouse in Bracknell, England.

Jensen is the man companies call when the worst happens. The “worst” encompasses all the events that are so frightening and chaotic that most people don’t like to think about them—plane crashes, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters among them. Jensen has no special gift for collecting bodies, identifying personal effects, or talking to victims’ families. What he does have is experience. Over a career spanning decades, Jensen has earned a reputation as the best in a very rarefied business. As the owner of Kenyon International Emergency Services, Jensen responds to anywhere from six to 20 events a year around the world (nine in 2016, not including ongoing efforts from 2015). His work has put him in harrowing proximity to some of the darkest headlines in recent history. He handled mortuary affairs after the Oklahoma City bombing, he flew straight to the Pentagon after 9/11, and he was involved in body recovery after Hurricane Katrina.

The 2008 helicopter crash in Peru wasn’t international news, but the recovery mission’s complexities made it a memorable one for Jensen. The heat made everything sticky, and the hazards of the jungle were ever-present. Jensen decided team members should travel in twos for fear of pumas and snakes. He’d done a risk assessment before setting out, and had learned that there were 23 kinds of poisonous snakes in the area. He’d only brought anti-venom for three, so he encouraged team members, if bitten, to get a good look at their assailant before they lost consciousness.

They were there to salvage whatever they could—personal possessions, skeletal fragments, and any evidence that might help families understand victims’ final moments. Before they could do that, they had to reach the site. Jensen at work is the zenith of efficiency: Every possible obstacle has already been encountered and overcome, with military calm. Jensen instructed the team to start clearing a space where a helicopter could land, and at the site climbers began stringing ropes up the slope so they could rappel up and down. They put any debris in buckets, which were then passed to an archaeologist, who sifted through them in search of skeletal fragments. To the untested eye, there was nothing of value to be found—the flight data recorder had already been retrieved, and it was clear there were no survivors. Still, Jensen searched.

All told, he and his team pulled 110 skeletal fragments from the hill, along with some personal effects and the cockpit voice recorder. The remains Kenyon recovered made it possible to positively identify almost everyone onboard the helicopter, which is a feat in a high-speed crash. Every night the team buried what they’d found and stood for a moment of silence. Those remains and belongings would be disinterred each morning and flown out by helicopter, and the team would begin again.

After days of scouring the hillside, they had recovered everything they could when Jensen saw something high up in a tree on the slope—a large piece of human tissue, stuck to a branch. It was in a spot risky to reach, even with ropes, but Jensen couldn’t leave it. He climbed up, retrieved it, and slipped it into a plastic pouch. His job was done. Everything he found would be returned to victims’ families. “They were able to understand that their loved one’s bodies weren’t just left for the jungle to take,” Jensen recalls, “even the fragments.”

Jensen doesn’t have any harrowing rescue stories. He’s looking for something of more abstract value—a piece of a person, literal or figurative, that he can bring back to a victim’s family to say “We tried.” He knows from experience that when a person’s life has been obliterated, even the tiniest shards can bring solace.


Many of the lost things Jensen and his team retrieve are taken to Kenyon’s offices in Bracknell, a town an hour from London with as many roundabouts as people. It’s not immediately apparent that this is a facility built to manage mass death. From the front the office is ordinary, a Brutalist concrete block indistinguishable from the offices that surround it. A little disco ball blinks through the blinds in one office window. But behind the front offices is a huge, hangar-like warehouse where recovered personal possessions are photographed, identified, and stored.

Long mesh tables are ready to receive incoming personal effects at Kenyon’s warehouse.

In perfect order on metal shelves circling the warehouse are tools that speak to the myriad tasks Kenyon performs when pressed into service. One locker holds all the clothes and sundries Jensen might need to deploy quickly, each in labeled Ziploc bags. There’s a first-aid smorgasbord for accidents on site and bulletproof vests for when Kenyon is called to conflict areas. There’s a crate of prayer rugs for Muslim family members and a box of teddy bears wearing little Kenyon T-shirts, for children in family-assistance centers. A refrigerated trailer, a portable morgue, rests in one corner with its door ajar. Along one wall looms a coffin draped in purple velvet—a tool for teaching team members, Jensen explains, but sinister all the same. A student is working alone at a desk, Photoshopping photographs of personal items onto white backgrounds to make them easier for families to identify later. The ceiling panels rattle in the rain, but otherwise the space is deathly quiet.

Kenyon only recently moved into this space, picked for its proximity to Heathrow, but Kenyon has a long history. In 1906, Harold and Herbert Kenyon, sons of a British funeral director, were asked to help identify and repatriate 28 bodies after a train derailed near Salisbury. The Kenyons, as employees still refer to themselves, deployed whenever they received a “shout” about a major incident. Then, they didn’t have the aid of DNA identification. Victims were identified by fingerprints and dental records if they had them, and by their belongings if they didn’t. As technologies grew more sophisticated, mass fatalities took on a larger scale. Air travel grew faster and easier, and plane crashes became deadlier. Weapons grew more powerful. The need for specialists became more urgent, and Kenyon went global.

Today most people assume governments handle the fallout from large-scale disasters. Often they do: Much of Jensen’s experience before joining Kenyon in 1998 was in the Army handling mortuary affairs. But beyond the military, there’s a big business for companies like Kenyon, both because of their expertise and because it can be helpful to have a team on the scene with no political affiliation. In the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, more than 40 countries lost tourists, each working to return its victims to their families. Bodies are not easily identifiable after a tsunami, and ethnicity is a poor indication of nationality: “I’ll stand in Phuket and say all Swedes stand up. And no one answers,” Jensen says. “You all have to work together.” Kenyon brought the equipment and served as an honest broker, prioritizing no nationality over another.

Above and below, Kenyon’s front offices look like any other office, but they’re organized to efficiently respond to mass death.

Along with terrorism, much of Jensen’s work involves aviation incidents. Many travelers assume that in the event of a plane crash, the airline takes on the multitude of responsibilities that come next. More often than not they don’t. Airlines and governments keep specialists like Kenyon on retainer because they can’t afford to make mistakes in their response. Aside from an ethical incentive to do right by victims’ families, the financial penalty for botching a response is astronomical. Years of lawsuits and negative press from dissatisfied families can be crippling. Malaysia Airlines, for example, has struggled to recover from broad criticism of its responses to the tragedies of MH370 and MH17 (Malaysia Airlines, Jensen reminded me several times, is not a Kenyon client). Airlines can hand off everything to Kenyon; their services include the organization of call centers, the identification and return of dead bodies, mass burials, and personal-property recovery.

Some of what’s expected of an airline after a crash was codified in federal law 20 years ago. Before that, carriers got away with fairly haphazard responses. The families who successfully pushed for stricter federal regulations had lost relatives on U.S. Air flight 427, which crashed near Pittsburgh in 1994. U.S. Air’s response to the crash was, according to wrenching letters from families to the airline, very poor.

“When the news of the personal effects being found in dumpsters came to light,” one family member wrote, “that was enough to send any caring individual over the edge. Who determines what personal effects are important and which ones should get swept into a dumpster? These are human beings we are talking about!! In some cases, a mere luggage tag is all that some people have to hang on to.”

Some countries still lag in their regulations. Mary Schiavo, an aviation lawyer and the former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, told me that after one crash in Venezuela, authorities did a perfunctory search for remains and then bulldozed what was left with a scoop-loader borrowed from a local farm. “I don’t mean to suggest anybody is not kind or thoughtful, because certainly the folks that I’ve dealt with over the years have tried to be kind and thoughtful when dealing with remains,” Schiavo added. "But sometimes, when they haven’t had experience, they don’t deliver the level of attention to detail that the [National Transportation Safety Board] and professional groups like Kenyon do. I mean, Kenyon is the group.” Kenyon is the difference between a smooth response and decade-long lawsuits.


Model planes, gifted to Jensen by airline clients, line the lobby in Kenyon’s offices.

When a commercial flight crashes, the client immediately notifies Jensen. Usually the client is the airline, though in some cases it may be a company like Rio Tinto, or even the county where the plane crashed. He gathers as much information as he can. First he tries to figure out who is responsible for what. Kenyon is a private company, so if the government decides to take over morgue administration Jensen defers to them, but remains on hand to advise. A few minutes into the call, Jensen knows enough about the incident to determine the airline’s most urgent needs. Within hours Kenyon’s ranks can swell from 27 full-time employees to up to 900 independent contractors, depending on the severity of the disaster. Kenyon’s team members don’t come from one industry, though many have worked in law enforcement. They do have one trait in common: They are extremely empathetic, while still being able to maintain an emotional distance from the victims. “You cannot become involved,” Jensen reminds them. Jensen prefers not to keep in touch with victims’ families, seeing himself as a trigger for their tragedies.

Every employee and team member has a job, and they deploy as needed. A chart hangs in a long hallway in Bracknell, detailing the workflow during a crisis. It’s crowded with a dizzying number of color-coded bubbles, each representing a job to be done. At the top is a red bubble, the senior incident coordinator—Jensen.

“You can’t undo the event, so the best you can do is not make it worse.”

Around the world, members of the crisis communications team wait by their phones, ready to answer questions from the media. Meanwhile, a hotel liaison team reaches out to a hotel close to the crash site. Victims’ families fly to the incident location from all over the world, so the hotel must be big enough and accessible enough to accommodate them. As families and Kenyons converge on the area, the chosen hotel receives a manual, via e-mail or fax, with instructions for positioning rooms and preparing for their grieving guests. Over the next few days, the hotel transforms into a family-assistance center where families will wait, mourning together and passing the time between briefings as best they can.

Crates in the warehouse hold all the tools Kenyon employees could need during a response, including prayer rugs for Muslim families in family assistance centers.

By the time his plans for a family-assistance center are in motion, Jensen is already en route to the incident location. Once Jensen has an idea of the condition of the bodies, he begins coordinating a morgue. The number of victims is less relevant for morgue planning than the condition of the bodies. A small plane that crashed in Mozambique in 2013, for instance, required more expansive morgue operations than some larger commercial flights. Even though only 33 passengers were killed in the crash, 900 fragmented skeletal fragments were recovered.

Often it falls to Jensen to act as a liaison between the families back at the hotel and the workers at the crash site. Every mass fatality is different, but Kenyon rarely works alone at the site—even in the response to the Rio Tinto crash in Peru, the government required two Peruvian policemen to join the team. Kenyons work alongside local law enforcement, medical examiners, firefighters, and the military. Everyone on the scene works quickly, so the elements don’t cause further harm to exposed remains and personal belongings.

A text Kenyon recommends team members refer to during responses.

As Jensen learns more about the crash, he briefs the families. The briefings are difficult. “You can’t undo the event, so the best you can do is not make it worse,” Jensen says grimly. “You have a pretty hard one going in.” Jensen wants so badly to give families a glimmer of hope, but instead he has to deliver the coldest truths. First he warns families that they’re about to hear some very direct information. Parents shepherd children out of the room. “You have to understand this is a high-speed impact, which means that your loved ones don’t look like us,” he might tell them. “What it means is we are likely to recover several thousand human remains.” At that point, there’s a gasp. Jensen has sucked all the hope from the room. Now his job is to help families transition.

Jensen doesn’t use the word closure. “I don’t see families ‘closing,’” he says. “It’s a transition from what was normal to the new normal.” The transition after losing someone is always difficult, but it’s compounded by the many uncertainties of a plane crash. Families often don’t receive a body, or even remains, for many weeks. Some receive nothing. No body means no definitive information to share with inquiring family and friends, no insurance to claim, and no burial to plan. The responsibilities that come with losing a loved one seem like a burden until you can’t make them. All families can do is wait for more information.

This office at Kenyon’s facility belongs to office manager Clare Pascucci. It is the epicenter of all cheer.

As remains and personal effects are being brought in from the crash site, Kenyons are collecting dental and medical records and conducting long interviews with families, seeking any details that might help identify victims. Each family must agree on one person who will receive the remains and recovered belongings. There are arguments, some of which end up in court. Kenyons explain the personal-effects process and ask families all the necessary questions: Would they like the recovered belongings cleaned? Would they like them mailed or hand-delivered? Jensen leaves every part of the process up to families. They have so little control over their circumstances, and the personal-effects process restores a sense of agency.

Families can even choose not to participate. To some, personal belongings are unimportant. For others, remains are unimportant. But almost everyone opts in. Hailey Shanks had just turned 4 when her mother, a flight attendant, was killed in the crash of Alaska 261 in 2000. Her grandmother received her mother’s recovered things—the pin from her mother’s uniform, and her belly-button ring—and it never would have occurred to her not to. “I think just to throw away any memory of it happening, it wouldn’t have crossed her mind,” Shanks says. Shanks’s grandmother keeps them in a little box in her bedroom. Shanks will hold them sometimes, but the trauma they carry with them spooks her. Still, she’s glad her grandmother has them. “I think it bothers her so much that she couldn’t be there—not that she’d want to be there—but that her daughter was in that position. I think to have any memory of her, and to remember what happened, is just important. Any piece of her.”


At the crash site, Jensen and his team remove hazardous materials and anything that might cause further damage to belongings, but items arrive in Bracknell in all states. They’re wet from weather and firefighting, and they smell like aviation fuel or decay. When a shipment arrives, team members carefully unpack each box and lay the items on long mesh tables in the middle of the room. The items are inspected and separated into “associated”—belongings with passengers’ names on them, or things found on or near a body—and “unassociated,” which includes anything from a watch found in a pile of wreckage to luggage with the name of a non-passenger on the tag. The associated items will be returned first, and the unassociated items will be photographed and put in an online catalog for families to peruse in case they recognize something.

Three replica personal effects used for training Kenyon team members.

Before the catalogs of photographs were available online, they were all hard copies, with six or more items on each page. It takes me an hour to flip through a catalog from a plane crash over a decade ago. Separated from its purpose, the catalog is a perfect index of the styles and pop culture of the time. There’s a Jessica Simpson Irresistible CD and a water-warped Ian Rankin book. Some items show obvious damage. There are blackened Legos and pages of eyeglasses with missing lenses and twisted temples, like a Dalí nightmare. There are some black boxers with Chef from South Park on the front. There’s a page of engraved wedding rings—Patricia, Marisa, Marietta, Laura, Giovanni—and a little pin shaped like a plane. Each item has a box describing its condition, and every item is marked “damaged.”

As families identify what they can from the online catalogs, Jensen keeps working to link unassociated items to victims. He’s relentless. He and his team use any clues available, including photos recovered from cameras and phone numbers retrieved from cell phones. Jensen has even taken car keys to car dealers, to see if they can tell him the vehicle-identification number. Usually dealers can only tell him which country the car was sold in, but even that can be an essential clue. For example, Jensen learned that a set of car keys recovered from the Germanwings crash were from a car sold in Spain, dramatically narrowing the pool of victims to whom they might belong.

“You don’t want to take away choices, because then you get the mother who says, ‘I cleaned my son’s clothes for 15 years, I wanted to be the last person to wash his shirt, not you.’”

Identifying personal effects can be more wrenching than identifying a body. “When you examine human remains, you do a physical examination,” Jensen explains. “You talk to a family and you interview them to collect information, and that information is used to make an ID—there’s not the personalization. When you go through the personal effects, you have the ability to learn all about a person. What’s on their playlist? You’re not looking to see what’s on their playlist, you’re looking on their computer to see if you can identify who it is.” A body is a body, but personal effects are a life. It’s impossible to feel detached from a victim when you’re looking at his or her wedding photos, taken just a few weeks earlier.

Jensen has come across personal effects that he’d find deeply, personally offensive under other circumstances. “Think of all the luggage you see getting checked in at an airport. Think of all the different societies, religions, and groups represented by those people on that aircraft. That’s what their belongings represent. You have things... ‘Oh, my God. Who would have this? Why would you have that picture or that book? Why would you support that organization?’” He gives these belongings the same care as any other—“You cannot become involved.”

Every step of the items’ return is a decision for the family. There is no assumption that families want the items cleaned. Jensen tells the story of one woman who lost her daughter on Pan Am Flight 103 in the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. When the woman first received her daughter’s things, she was upset by the fuel odor they carried. The smell filled the house and lingered. After a while, the woman began to appreciate it as a lasting reminder of her daughter. “You don’t want to take away choices, because then you get the mother who says, ‘I cleaned my son’s clothes for 15 years, I wanted to be the last person to wash his shirt, not you.’”

Boxes of personal effects.

For the families who don’t want to claim the personal effects—or who aren’t ready to claim them—Jensen stores most unassociated items for two years. In some cases, he stores them for longer, until an ongoing investigation into an incident wraps up. Boxes full of unassociated items line the warehouse several rows high, the air around them tinged with the smell of jet fuel. These lost things carry no memories for me, but I can feel their weight. I think of the heaps of shoes displayed at Auschwitz, and I have the feeling that even if I didn’t know what had happened to these things, I would know that they were attached to tragedy. Jensen reaches into one box and pulls out a passport in a Ziploc bag, a hole punched in one corner to prevent identity theft. (Victims’ names are usually released following a plane crash, and identity theft and fraudulent claims are common.) When I’d shoved mine in my pocket in New York the day before, it seemed like such a mundane document. Now I think of what a passport means—citizenship, identity, an adventure—and feel real grief for its owner. It has a small picture stuck in the spine, and the stamps in its pages are a sad record of happier travels.


Many of the things Jensen has found won’t be returned. After two years, or however long it takes for any ongoing investigation to wrap up, these lost things Jensen has collected will be destroyed. But the memories Jensen has collected will continue to haunt and help him.

Jensen knows, for instance, why you shouldn’t inflate your life jacket before you leave a sinking plane—he’s arrived at crash sites to find corpses floating eerily inside the plane, trapped by their life vests, while others survived. He knows that it’s pointless to spend your life worrying about dying in a mass fatality. He thinks of a woman he found dead in the wreckage of the Oklahoma City bombings. On one foot she wore a high heel, on the other a walking shoe. The woman, he realized, had just gotten into the office and was changing her shoes. If she’d been running five minutes late that day, she would have lived.

A coffin used for training Kenyon’s team members.

Incidents in conflict areas may require precautions, like this bullet-proof vest.

Like anyone, Jensen thinks about how he would feel and act in the end. “I know what I would want back from my family members. I know what I would want given back to Brandon,” he says, nodding at his husband, Kenyon’s COO, Brandon Jones. “Wedding ring, bracelets”—Jones and Jensen both wear woven bracelets they gave each other—“special things. He’d probably want to sell them,” he jokes.

Clocks on the walls of the office show the different time zones Kenyon operates in.

Jones thinks for a second. “It’s weird,” he says, “I don’t have anxiety flying. I don’t look at life differently than I did before Kenyon. But I do look at the importance of things differently. It’s things that I carry with me that are in my bag, always there. Mementos that he’s given me from places he’s been, which I always carry. Things I may not see on a daily basis, but which I always see when I put my passport in. And putting my stuff away on the plane, I think, These are the things I know would mean something to him, that he would carry on if it was returned to him.

The work has taught Jensen that anxiety about disasters won’t help—but he still counts the doors to the exit before he walks into any hotel room, and on flights he and Jones wait to take off their shoes until the seatbelt sign is turned off (most plane crashes occur during takeoff and landing, and you don’t want to risk being barefoot on the tarmac in case escape is necessary). I’d wondered if Jensen might hold some secret to living calmly in the age of terrorism, and that’s it: Indulge your practical anxieties; don’t waste time on dread.


Most families opt to receive belongings in the mail, in which case larger items are wrapped up in white tissue paper, or placed in small jewelry boxes. Some families prefer to have belongings delivered. That’s the really hard part.

Once, Jensen was tasked with returning the personal effects of a young man killed in a plane crash. Early on the day of the crash, the man had called his mother to tell her he was boarding. When she turned on the TV later and saw that his plane had plunged into the ocean, she knew.

But then, Jensen remembers, she wasn’t sure. Couldn’t her son have swum to an island nearby? Could the Coast Guard check? They checked. Days after the crash, almost all the passengers had been positively identified through DNA samples, but none of the recovered tissues were her son’s.

As passengers’ belongings washed up on the beach, fishermen and sheriffs brought them in. They recovered a few of her son’s belongings, including two waterlogged passports—he carried a visa in one—and a suitcase that appeared to belong to him. The company called his mother to ask if she’d like them delivered or sent. She asked that someone bring them to her, and Jensen volunteered.

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Jensen remembers arriving at the woman’s house, and seeing her son’s truck still in the driveway. His room hadn’t been touched since he’d left for his trip. The woman had quit her job and was living in suspended animation. “She wasn’t coping,” Jensen recalls. “There was no proof. No body.” Jensen and a member of his staff cleared a table and laid out a white cloth. They asked the mother to leave the room, and began placing her son’s belongings on the sheet. They covered them, so she wouldn’t walk in and be overwhelmed by the sight of her son’s things all at once. He asked her to come in.

They showed the mother the two passports. She put her head in her hands and rocked back and forth. The next item had puzzled Jensen. In the recovered suitcase they’d found a pack of orange curlers, like the kind Jensen’s mother used to wear in the ’70s. The young man had short hair—it didn’t make sense. Jensen assumed the fishermen had found the suitcase half-opened and had put other passengers’ things inside. “Please don’t take offense,” Jensen told the woman as he presented the curlers.

The woman looked at the curlers. They were her son’s, she said. He’d borrowed her mother’s suitcase, where she stored her rollers. He knew how important they are to his grandmother, the woman told Jensen. He wouldn’t have done anything with them but kept them where they belonged. Jensen remembers her looking to him next. “So what you’re telling me, Robert, is that my son is not coming home.”

Lauren Larson is an editor at GQ.