Fumes From Body Force an Evacuation : Investigation: The gases may have come from cyanide that a Laguna Beach woman reportedly ingested along with alcohol. There are no injuries at the hospital, where the body was first taken. Authorities strongly suspect that her death was a suicide.

A hospital emergency room was evacuated briefly Tuesday when the body of a woman who died after drinking bourbon spiked with cyanide began emitting potentially harmful fumes, officials said.

Police Sgt. Greg Bartz identified the woman as Ruth M. Cahalan and said her death was being investigated as a suicide. Cahalan, 50, was married to Michael D. Cahalan, chairman of UC Irvine’s department of physiology and biophysics. She was listed as a staff research assistant in the same department in a UCI faculty and staff directory.

Laguna Beach Fire Department Capt. Bob Scruggs said a six-member hazardous-material team outfitted in protective suits was brought in to put Cahalan’s body in three layers of rubber bags for transfer to the Orange County coroner’s office. Her body was taken in the back of a Fire Department pickup truck, he said.

The emergency room evacuation lasted only a few hours and there were no injuries reported among the hospital staff, patients or emergency crews, Scruggs said.

Cahalan was pronounced dead at the South Coast Medical Center emergency room at 11:41 a.m., after paramedics rushed her to the hospital, said Sarah Sprague, a nurse who treated her.

Bartz said an officer was sent to the woman’s home on the 2900 block of Mountain View Drive after her psychologist called Laguna Beach police at 10:57 a.m. and warned that Cahalan had threatened to harm herself.

According to Bartz, the officer arrived at Cahalan’s home less than a minute after police received the psychologist’s call and found her on the floor.

Bartz said that he arrived minutes later and detected a strong odor “that smelled like chlorine and sulfuric acid.” The officers found an empty glass on a table and a bottle of potassium cyanide nearby. It appeared that Cahalan had mixed three or four teaspoons of cyanide with bourbon and swallowed it, said Bartz.

Scruggs said that firefighters and a hazardous-material team from the Newport Beach and Huntington Beach fire departments were dispatched to the hospital at 1:30 p.m., when a deputy coroner sent to retrieve Cahalan’s body noticed a strong smell of cyanide.

The emergency room staff and deputy coroner had not been told that she had ingested cyanide.

“We had no idea there was cyanide involved when she got here,” said Sprague.

Scruggs said that Cahalan still had cyanide powder on her lips, and the results could have been catastrophic if the paramedics, police officers or the hospital staff who treated her had attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“This lady endangered everybody who came in contact with her,” said Scruggs. “If anyone had attempted mouth-to-mouth, they would have died from the cyanide on her lips.”

Instead, the hospital and emergency staff tried unsuccessfully to revive her through cardiopulmonary resuscitation and a bag that forces oxygen into a patient when squeezed.

The danger from cyanide contamination “was relatively low” by the time Cahalan’s body was removed from the hospital, said Scruggs.

A spokesman for the coroner’s office said there were no extraordinary protective measures taken when Cahalan’s body was removed from the bags. An autopsy will be performed today in an attempt to determine the cause of death, the spokesman said.

Bartz said that police had been called to Cahalan’s home in the past for minor disturbances. In addition to her husband, Cahalan is survived by two children, ages 14 and 12, said Bartz.