Radioactive Bit Recovered After Anonymous Tip

An anonymous caller Friday led searchers to a small steel box containing a potentially lethal radioactive pellet that had been aboard a pickup truck stolen nearly a week ago from an industrial X-ray firm here.

Officials with United States Testing said they received a telephone call telling them that the stainless steel box containing the deadly iridium 192 could be found in bushes behind the firm’s office.

Robert Mallory, manager of the Oceanside lab, went outside and found the intact box after searching for a few minutes.

Mallory said he checked the container with a Geiger counter and found no radiation was leaking.

Discovery of the material delighted United States Testing officials, who were concerned that the box might have been tampered with, releasing radioactivity that could have posed a health threat.

About the size of a lunch pail, the box was sealed and would be difficult to penetrate, but experts with the company were worried that someone with the right tools and enough persistence could pry the pill-sized radioactive pellet out.

The incident began Tuesday when company employees discovered that one of their trucks had been stolen from a parking lot outside the office. Locked inside was the box containing the iridium 192.

On Thursday, police issued an alert to law enforcement agencies in five Western states to be on the lookout for the truck. On Friday morning, sheriff’s deputies recovered the truck in a grassy field just south of busy California 78 in San Marcos, but the box containing the radioactive pellet was missing.

Mallory spent the day searching with authorities but decided to return to his Oceanside office late Friday afternoon. About 4:30, one of the secretaries answered a call from an unidentified person who said where the box could be found.

The secretary was unable to distinguish who the caller was and could not detect any dialect or other characteristic in the voice, Mallory said.