Posted on 08/12/2002 7:55:13 PM PDT by B-bone
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. postal inspectors investigating the anthrax mailings linked to five deaths have discovered a mailbox that tested positive for traces of the bacteria, a postal official said on Monday.
The mailbox was found on Thursday night in Princeton, New Jersey, and has been sent to a U.S. Army facility in Aberdeen, Maryland, for forensic analysis, U.S. Postal Service spokesman Dan Mihalko told Reuters.
He said the mailbox was discovered as investigators checked hundreds of boxes from which mail is funneled to a postal sorting center in Trenton, New Jersey, where four anthrax-laced letters were postmarked last year.
"We've been looking at all the mailboxes that feed into the Trenton facility," Mihalko said. "One of them did test positive."
The mailbox was sent to the army laboratory for more conclusive tests, he said, adding, "We've seen in the past, field tests that turn up false positives."
Five people died and 13 were sickened last year as anthrax-tainted letters were sent to government officials and media outlets in Washington, Florida and New York. The letters were mailed in the weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks.
The FBI launched an investigation in October to find the person responsible for the anthrax attacks. Authorities are offering a $2.5 million reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.
There had to have been a non-trivial amount of powder outside the tin, too—the CDC followed a trail of contaminated post offices from AMI back to the West Palm Beach main branch. But what they didn't find was any contamination in the chain between West Palm Beach and New Jersey, so you're right, that the AMI letter passed through Trenton is pure speculation on their part.
A very interesting point in support of my argument, which I had not thought of or read about. Thanks.
Again, the timing of that "JLo" letter is very interesting. If everything had gone as planned, things would have been far worse than they were, as if that can be imagined. My guess is we were supposed to wake up on 9-11 to witness first the destruction of the WTC, then to see the White House and the Capitol reduced to smoldering rubble shortly aftwerwards and then, while we were still reeling from that, we would have got the news that people were dropping like flies from inhalation anthrax at a company called American Media, right by the main hijacker nest, and that the source of the illness was a tin containing a Star of David buried in a pile of dust.
And, once the dust had settled and the "unimportant people" at the tabloid had been made an example of, the more explicit threats would have rolled in:
THIS IS NEXT
WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX
YOU CAN NOT STOP US
ARE YOU AFRAID?
The powder in that tin was mainly and perhaps entirely soap powder. If the anthrax came in that letter, it might have been mixed in with the soap powder, or it may have been elsewhere in the package.
There's a Franklin Avenue in Princeton. It runs parallel to Nassau Street.
The mailbox was removed last week and there is no danger to the public, McGreevey said Monday. He spoke at a press conference with the state attorney general, David Samson, and Louie Allen, special agent in charge of the FBI's Newark office.
splain me this: if the contaminated mailbox was tested positive for anthrax resulting in postal workers contracting the bacteria in Oct '01...and was "removed last week"...why hasn't other the other mail posted through it over the past 9 months resulted in additional cases of anthrax?
I believe there was another mailbox in DC that also tested positive.
Don't forget, the old swab tests are considered garbage.
If I were going to put Anthrax in the mail and wanted to make sure it got there, I'd put in a the box near the post office just before pick up time and watch it get "into the system".
In investigating, I'd look for a pattern..e.g. Tuesday seems to be a favorite day...Who has off on Tuesday??? and can run around doing errands???
Everything was happening on Tuesdays...
Sac
This specific mailbox tested positive for anthrax on 8/8/2002.
Scratch that connection, the story I read was incomplete. Now that I found the full account, it doesn't offer any clues. The traffic stop was on northbound I-95 (which is the NJT for part of its length), but was in fact all the way down in Pikesville, MD, a northwest suburb of Baltimore some 150 miles south of Princeton. That circle is just too big to draw any kind of conclusions from—for all we know Jarrah was coming back from meeting Hatfill.
It still makes you wonder, though, just what Jarrah was doing all the way down there.
Sorry that I misread your question the first time.
I'm relying on memory here, but the first cases of anthrax in that area came from the Hamilton Township mail sorting facility. If I'm not mistaken, the Princeton post office also tested positive for anthrax, and the Princeton post office sends its mail to Hamilton to be sorted. And now a mail box in Princeton tested positive (although it may be a false positive, even though I doubt that they did just one test on the box before hauling it away).
Again, relying on my memory, the envelopes were heavily taped, and the anthrax spores didn't start spewing until they had gone through a mail sorting machine, one with rollers, that in essence squeezed the anthrax out of the envelopes. That, of course, didn't happen at the mailbox or at the post office. It happened at the mail sorting facility. The only thing I can think of is not enough anthrax had gotten out of the envelope at the mailbox to cause a healthy person to have gotten anthrax--and I don't think there would have been enough anthrax coming out of the mail slot to make for major contamination of a person mailing a letter. To the best of my knowledge, no one at the Princeton post office contracted anthrax either. It was only persons at the Hamilton mail facility (as far as this path of the anthrax letters goes) who were the first in this chain to contract anthrax. This doesn't include, of course, the persons who were at the other end of the mail delivery system or the persons who died because their mail probably came in contact with the contaminated letters.
Not when it's Postal related, that's the job of the US Postal Inspection Service.
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