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.

“They were able to understand that their loved one’s bodies weren’t just left for the jungle to take, even the fragments.”

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.