Rogue Pest Exterminator Sent to Prison

An exterminator who sprayed more than 880 city homes and businesses with a deadly pesticide used in farm fields was sentenced Tuesday to a two-year prison term for violating a federal environmental law.

Ruben Brown, a retired butcher, had pleaded guilty to two counts of illegally tainting homes with the lethal nerve agent methyl parathion. Brown is one of a growing cadre of exterminators prosecuted in recent months by federal authorities for poisoning thousands of dwellings across the Midwest and South, requiring a mounting toxic cleanup that has cost the government more than $70 million.

Federal environmental cleanup crews have tested more than 6,000 homes and relocated more than 2,000 people from poisoned residences, mostly in Mississippi, Louisiana and other deep South states. But Brown wreaked a similar destructive swath through inner-city apartments and houses in Chicago, Environmental Protection Agency investigators alleged, haphazardly applying the brown spray clients called “cotton poison” and “Mississippi stuff.”

EPA and Mississippi health investigators stumbled on Brown’s name last spring as they were poring over records of people who bought agricultural pesticides in that state. Noticing Brown’s name repeatedly turn up as a buyer of methyl parathion, investigators apprehended another man who had been working with him, then followed Brown’s trail in Chicago.

Using a log of clients seized from Brown’s home, EPA investigators went door-to-door through the summer and fall, testing homes and businesses for traces of methyl parathion. The pesticide is a chemical cousin of the lethal nerve gas Sarin--able to kill people after contact with a small amount.

Federal officials have since relocated 93 families in Chicago and repaired scores of homes at a cost of $5.2 million.

Speaking before U.S. Magistrate W. Thomas Rosemond Jr., Brown and asked the judge for the freedom to continue raising three grandchildren in his west suburban Chicago home. Brown’s lawyer, Richard Dickinson, stressed that Brown had no prior criminal record.