Oxford, Connecticut, died on November 21, 2001. Another 31 people tested positive for exposure to anthrax spores. Ten thousand more people, deemed “at risk” from possible exposure, underwent antibiotic prophylaxis.
Thirty-five postal facilities and commercial mailrooms were contaminated. The presence of Bacillus anthracis was detected in seven of 26 buildings tested on Capitol Hill. From October through December 2001, the Laboratory Response Network tested more than 120,000 clinical and environmental samples for the presence of Bacillus anthracis. The U.S. Postal Service closed two heavily contaminated processing and distribution centers (“P&DC”): Trenton P&DC, located in Hamilton, New Jersey; and Brentwood P&DC, located in Washington, D.C. The Brentwood facility, closed on October 21, 2001, did not become operational again until December 22, 2003. The Trenton facility, which was closed on October 18, 2001, reopened on March 14, 2005. More than 1.8 million letters, packages, magazines, catalogs, and other mailed items were quarantined at these two facilities. The Environmental Protection Agency used $27 million from its Superfund program to pay 27 contractors and three federal and state agencies for the cleanup of the Capitol Hill facilities.
All of these infections and exposures that occurred in the fall of 2001 resulted from the anthrax mailings described above. All of the anthrax was mailed over a short period of time to locations where all infected individuals were likely exposed. Many of the victims shared places of employment, and the bodies of the five deceased victims all contained the same strain of anthrax. This strain, known as “Ames,” was isolated in Texas in 1981, and then shipped to USAMRIID, where it was maintained thereafter. Another natural outbreak of Ames has never again been recorded.
The evidence (as outlined in the time line below) supports the conclusion that the mail attacks occurred on two separate occasions. The two letters used in the first attack were postmarked on September 18, 2001, and were sent to Tom Brokaw at NBC News and to the New York Post, both located in New York City. Three weeks later, two letters postmarked October 9, 2001 were mailed to Senators Daschle and Leahy at their Washington, D.C. offices. Hard evidence of the attacks surfaced on October 3, 2001, when Robert Stevens, the AMI employee who worked in Boca Raton, Florida, was diagnosed as having contracted inhalational anthrax, an infection from which he later died.
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