“Take a whiff of this.”
Jay Stuart DeVaughn wrote those words on 26 letters mailed to President Obama, private citizens and foreign embassies. Several of the letters, most mailed in 2009, included rants about health-care reform — and all included a suspicious powder.
Suspicious mail fades as issue
DeVaughn was sentenced to six years in federal prison for the incidents, which, although no one was harmed, raised the obvious specter of another anthrax attack.
A decade ago, anthrax spores delivered in letters killed five people, injured 17 and changed how the U.S. Postal Service and other institutions think about mail safety.
The 10th anniversary of the attacks, the debate over testing an anthrax vaccine on children and such incidents as the DeVaughn case may put the threat of such bioterrorism back in the news, but for many — even some postal workers — the issue’s immediacy has faded.
“Most people, I think, have forgotten about anthrax in the mail,” Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe said. “And truthfully, that’s probably not a bad thing.”
The Postal Service has been more focused on its very existence, as mail volume continues to fall and it loses billions of dollars.
But how safe is the mail?
The Postal Service now relies on both human checks and machine screenings to track suspicious mail, it says. With tens of thousands of postal facilities to protect, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service has responded to more than 52,000 calls about suspicious mail since 2001, it said, and inspectors respond to about 10 calls daily. Most, they said, are false alarms.
Shift supervisors receive regular updates on evolving threats, and postal inspectors practice regularly with local law enforcement agencies in anticipation of an attack.
But mail was used as a weapon long before anthrax.
Historically, cases of dangerous mail are spawned by personal disputes between jilted lovers or feuding neighbors, inspectors said. In 1952, for example, a woman was arrested after she mailed a box of cyanide-laced Bon Bon Caramels to her estranged husband. He was suspicious and alerted authorities.
Before anthrax, the most high-profile mail scare involved Theodore Kaczynski — dubbed the Unabomber — who over nearly 20 years killed three people and injured 23 with mail bombs before he was arrested in 1996.
Two years ago, inspectors arrested a West Virginia man for mailing an improvised explosive device to a former neighbor in Minnesota. He’s serving 2½ years in prison.
And an unsolved case from January still puzzles officials: Two packages with incendiary devices delivered to Maryland government buildings flashed when workers opened them. The next day, a similar package addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ignited at a District of Columbia postal facility.
The exploding packages “took employees back to anthrax and the evacuations back in 2001,” said Dena Briscoe, president of the local chapter of the American Postal Workers Union, who spends time consoling colleagues still rattled by the anthrax deaths of postal workers Joseph P. Curseen and Thomas L. Morris Jr.
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