The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (15 page)

Meanwhile, Teresa continued to improve, but the wound in her arm remained deep and unsightly. Dr. Malik grafted some skin over the area, which helped with its appearance. “When the skin graft healed up, I felt a lot better,” Teresa said, and soon after she decided to go back to work. The day she returned was a day of quiet celebration. “It was a week before Thanksgiving, on November 17.” A year later she said “I feel fine. I still go on the same mail route in Ewing Township.”

Did she ever think about leaving her job because of the experience? With a chuckle she answered, “No, I just think it was a oneshot thing. I just keep going.” Still, the circle of scar tissue on her forearm—nearly the size of a half-dollar—will never let her forget about her difficult experience.

The Saturday night that Malik gave the specimen to an FBI agent two other agents went to Dr. Jones’s home to discuss Teresa Heller’s case. They also asked if Jones would be willing to look at Richard Morgano, the second postal worker they had heard about that day. The next day the agents brought Morgano to her house. Dr. Jones examined his right arm and said, “It looks like it to me.” Morgano was sure that he had become infected at the Hamilton center. “They’re saying that the building is safe, and I’m saying there’s no way the building is safe. I know there’s anthrax in there.”

Eddy Bresnitz became New Jersey’s chief epidemiologist in 1999. A native of Montreal who attended medical school at McGill University, he came to the United States in 1974 for training in epidemiology. He later taught at the Medical College of Pennsylvania where he became chairman of the Department of Community Medicine. Three years into his job at the New Jersey health department, he was in the thick of the anthrax crisis. He was the Health Department’s contact with Dr. Faruk Presswalla, to whom he had sent Teresa Heller’s biopsy. On October 16, Dr. Presswalla told Bresnitz by phone what he later formalized in a memo: “In my opinion, the gross specimen and microscopic examination are highly suggestive of cutaneous anthrax.” The required staining techniques for a definitive diagnosis were not available in his laboratory. Bresnitz then made arrangements for the specimen to be sent to the CDC. On Thursday, October 18, at 7:30 in the morning, just before leaving home, he received a call from Robert Kinnard of the CDC:

“Oh boy. That is something,” Bresnitz answered, and thought to himself, “This is going to be a busy day.”

He thought about his visit, 3 days earlier, to the Hamilton postal center. Some 400 workers had assembled in the cafeteria to hear him. He told them they were basically not at risk from the anthrax letters that had been processed there. “The envelopes were sealed with tape,” he said, “and there’s been no evidence of anthrax illness here.” Now, however, with the news of Teresa Heller’s anthrax and the suspicion of Richard Morgano’s, Bresnitz returned to the center. “It was 11:30 a.m. when I got there, and no one was working. The sorting machines were not running.” Again, he met with the workers in the cafeteria and tried to answer their questions. It was clear to Bresnitz that “they were not going back to work.” They needed no convincing when he told them the building would be closed. When he went outside, he unexpectedly saw Congressman Chris Smith and several Postal Service officials meeting with the press. Their message to reporters: “This place is closed for now. We’re going to be doing more testing.”

That afternoon, six CDC officials were en route to New Jersey by air from Atlanta, due to arrive by evening. They would be joining in a meeting with state health department staff and postal officials to review everything known about the situation. The meeting began at 9 p.m. at the Nassau Inn in Princeton. “There were about 20 people in the room and a few others from CDC on the phone,” recalled George DiFerdinando, who, as the state’s acting health commissioner, presided. “We talked about what we needed to do over the next 10 hours and the next day or two.”

A difference of opinion emerged about when the Hamilton Center could be reopened. “We’ve hired a contractor who claims he can clean it in a brief period of time, somewhere between 24 and 48 hours,” a postal representative said. “Well, how is he going to do this? What is his technique?” others wanted to know. “We’re not really sure,” came the answer. Still, the postal people seemed willing to rely on the word of the contractor.

The pressure to reopen was driven in part by the huge loss of dollars and efficiency if mail had to be processed elsewhere. Moreover, the fact that the Brentwood facility was still open also prompted some second-guessing. “What do they know in Brentwood that we don’t know, because they’re not closing?” one participant wondered. In the course of the evening, the postal representatives left the room a number of times to confer by phone with higher-level management. Annoyed by the interruptions, DiFerdinando eventually turned to one of the postal people and said: “If I can’t negotiate with you, maybe we need to drive over to Hamilton where I can talk to the guys I’m negotiating with.” “No, no, no, there’s no need for that,” came the answer.

Jennita Reefhuis, one of the CDC officials present, felt bad for Dave Bowers and the other “postal guys,” as she called them. “They were so torn, because they saw our point about the need for safety, but they also had a business to run and knew that people were depending on their mail.”

Christina Tan, another CDC official, described the discussions as “confusing.” The following year she joined the New Jersey Health Department as director of its Communicable Diseases Service. As we talked in her office, in Hamilton Township, I noticed her gold loop earrings and the large Chinese-language character hanging from her necklace. I asked if the character had special meaning, perhaps good luck. She laughed, “It’s my name, Tan.” On the wall to the left of her desk hung an eerily beautiful night photo of the Twin Towers, their windows brightly lit. In the same frame was a letter signed by Acting Governor Donald DeFrancesco, thanking Dr. Tan for her “extraordinary humanitarian work” during the terror crisis. As she sat below the letter, she thought about the extended to-and-fro of the October 18 meeting: “Whatever recommendation was made, you know, one way or the other, you could see the arguments for either side. Whether you opened the postal building or whether you closed it, at that time, you were damned if you do and damned if you don’t, either way.”

The issue of whether and when to reopen dragged on. “We weren’t really getting anywhere,” DiFerdinando said, as he recounted what happened in the end:

The room fell silent. Then one of the postal representatives said, “Well if you weren’t standing there, we wouldn’t be able to open.” “That’s your decision,” DiFerdinando answered. “I don’t know what’s going on in that building, so I can’t vouch for its safety.” That comment was the turning point. Minutes later everyone at the table came to an agreement. The facility would stay closed “until we knew more about the extent of contamination and how to clean it up.”

Eddy Bresnitz was at that meeting. Ten months later, sitting in his office at the New Jersey State Department of Health and Senior Services, he considered what subsequently was learned about anthrax in the Hamilton facility. Wearing a dark business suit, his lean frame suggested that of a middle-aged distance runner. “Look at those dots,” he said, pointing to the wall behind his desk. Hanging next to a map of New Jersey was a 3 × 5 foot diagram labeled: Postal and Distribution Center in Hamilton. The red dots were as pervasive as on a face full of chicken pox. Each represented an area where in subsequent months anthrax spores were found. No section of the 281,000 square foot structure was spared. How many dots are there? “I don’t know the exact number, but it’s hundreds and hundreds,” Bresnitz answered. He drove home the point: “Even though there were just four anthrax letters [that we know of], this place is completely contaminated. Four corners. And what you don’t see on the diagram is the other dimensions, from floor to ceiling, and in the ventilation system.”

Bresnitz thought back to the meeting on the night of October 18 and the naïve optimism of the postal representatives. In the end, happily, they joined the consensus, announced by DiFerdinando, to keep the building shut. The diagram on the wall made clear that to have done otherwise could have been disastrous. On October 19 another Hamilton postal worker, Patrick O’Donnell, was found to have had skin anthrax. Again, DiFerdinando took the lead. The New Jersey Department of Health would now recommend that the 800 people who worked at the facility, and the 400 who worked at the local post offices it serviced, begin preventive antibiotic treatment.

On November 2, the
Wall Street Journal
ran an article titled “Seven Days in October Spotlight Weakness of Bioterrorism Response.” It included a review of the anthrax incidents between October 15 and 22 that ended with the deaths of Thomas Morris and Joseph Curseen. Ricardo Custodio, a public health doctor, summarized the article in
Medical Editor’s Column
, an on-line publication of health management groups, and identified a single bright spot during that devastating week:

It was mid-summer 2002, and the sun hung high over central New Jersey. Two towns, 25 miles apart, shared the noonday brightness. Willingboro is more rustic and Princeton Junction is more affluent, but each is a picture of suburban calm. In both communities, clusters of comfortable single-family homes line quiet streets. And in both the residents reflect a relaxed diversity. They include hard-working families of many backgrounds—white, black, Asian, immigrant, and native born.

Elbow Lane in Willingboro leads to a winding street where branches, heavy with maple leaves, dip over rooftops. Set back from the inner curve of the street is a brick-and-wood two-story home. Norma Wallace smiled broadly: “I hope it was not too difficult finding your way?” Not bad, only one wrong turn, I answered. Norma’s black hair hung in short thin strands. Her face was expressive. She sat at one end of a cream-colored couch near a large photograph taken a few months earlier, after she left the hospital. She pointed to each face: “That’s my mother, my daughter, my granddaughter.” A white gentleman was at their right. “That’s Dr. Topiel, a wonderful man.” Martin Topiel had led the team of doctors toward her recovery, such as it is. Nine months after contracting inhalation anthrax, she remained weak and had difficulty with her memory.

Norma was dressed in khaki slacks and an aqua T-shirt emblazoned “FLEX Gym.” “I used to go there and work out,” she said. “That was before I got sick. Now I do my exercising at Virtua.” Virtua Memorial Hospital in Mount Holly was also where she spent 18 days before being discharged on November 5, 2001.

Norma began feeling ill on Sunday, October 14. “I felt like I had a cold. I was running a fever, vomiting, and I had diarrhea. I didn’t know what I was experiencing, but I knew that I was sick.” She took aspirin, drank a lot of water, and went to work on Monday and Tuesday, at the postal distribution center in nearby Hamilton Township. Her diarrhea and vomiting improved, but her breathing had become more difficult. “I went to the doctor on Wednesday, and he told me to take Tylenol because it would be more effective than aspirin.” Her fever persisted. With the onset of chest pain, on Friday afternoon, October 19, she went to the Virtua emergency room.