The widow of a Florida man who was the first of five people to die in the 2001 anthrax attacks has reached a settlement in her wrongful-death suit against the U.S. government, Reuters reported, citing a court filing.
“The parties have reached a tentative settlement subject to required approval by officials in the Department of Justice,” said the Oct. 27 document filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in West Palm Beach, Reuters reported. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
Maureen Stevens had contended that her husband, Robert Stevens, who worked in Boca Raton as a tabloid photo editor, was exposed to anthrax as a result of negligence on the part of the government, which she said had failed to secure the anthrax bacillus at a military laboratory.
A decade after the anthrax attacks killed five people and caused at least 17 others to become ill, some mysteries and questions remain, despite the government’s conclusion that Bruce E. Ivins, an Army biodefense expert who worked at Fort Detrick, Md., carried out the attacks. Some of the doubts have raised by scientists, as Main Justice reported recently, while others have been based on intuition, most notably in the case of Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who voiced skepticism about the government’s findings, as we reported.
Leahy’s office was the target of an anthrax mailing, as was that of Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, at the time the Democratic leader in the Senate. Why those lawmakers were targets has never been established, just as it has never been established why the Florida tabloid editor was a victim. Other victims who died or were made ill, like mail handlers in Washington, seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
