Biodefense Researcher Suspected in Anthrax Mailings Dead from Apparent Suicide
by John Little on 1/08/2008The FBI was closing in and he knew it:
Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the past 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Fort Detrick, Md., had been informed of the impending prosecution, people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and with the FBI investigation said.
Ivins’ name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case that disrupted mail service and Senate business three weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Maryland scientist had for years played a pivotal role in research to improve anthrax vaccines, preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.
Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also had helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator’s office in Washington, D.C.
Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after having ingested a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague who declined to be identified out of concern, he said, that he would be harassed by the FBI.
It’s not difficult to see why he might have been a suspect:
He detected an apparent anthrax leak in December 2001, at the height of the anthrax mailings investigation, but did not report it. Ivins considered the problem solved when he cleaned the affected office with bleach.
“I didn’t keep records or verify the cultures because I was concerned that records might be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act,” he said in a sworn statement included in the Army report.
“I was also afraid that reporting would have raised great alarm within the institute, which at the time was very busy” working on the anthrax mailing samples.
Shady.
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