Town Stunned to Be Anthrax Letters’ Source

In this bucolic town, where autumn has painted the trees in warm golden hues, someone arrived with poisoned envelopes filled with anthrax.

Residents have seen terrorism in Israel and Oklahoma City and, more recently, in New York. They did not expect terrorism in Ewing, where deer wander into backyards in wintertime.

FBI agents told local residents--and the world--on Friday that anthrax-laden letters sent to newscaster Tom Brokaw and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) may have come from a mailbox in a small housing tract here.

Residents are frightened because no one knows why the attacks originated in Ewing, one of a cluster of small bedroom communities surrounding the state capital, Trenton.

Mayor Alfred Bridges’ phone began to ring as soon as the news got out. His constituents, friends and neighbors in this quiet bedroom community wanted answers.

What’s happening, Al? Do I need to be tested? they asked.

But Bridges couldn’t answer his neighbor, nor any of the dozens of locals who called his cell phone or woke him up in the middle of the night at home. The FBI forbade him from speaking. And he was growing angrier by the hour.

“Everyone’s scared,” Bridges said. “When they call me, I tell them, ‘I understand why you’re fearful. I’m scared too.’ ”

Concern about anthrax was everywhere, but it seemed out of place in a town of 35,000, where the most recent momentous event came a few months back when the old General Motors plant was razed.

When the FBI came to Charlotte Kaplan-Piepszak’s door Friday afternoon, a media helicopter buzzed overhead.

“You know why we’re here, right?” the man asked.

She did. Still, she was surprised when he asked her to lower her head when she spoke so the zoom lenses up above couldn’t pick up what she was saying.

“I knew they weren’t joking around then,” said Kaplan-Piepszak, who has lived for three decades on a cul-de-sac in this quiet neighborhood of boxy 1950s homes. Suddenly just about everything required more scrutiny.

They asked if she knew any chemists, and she remembered a young couple who had moved to the neighborhood a few years ago--the man worked, she had heard, for a local pharmaceutical company. She had never given the job a second thought until now.

Her next-door neighbor, Bob Geller, had noticed for a few weeks his regular “mail girl” hadn’t been around. He later determined she had been infected with anthrax.

“After the attacks in [New York], I remember telling people here they had nothing to worry about: Who would do anything in Trenton?” he said. “And now we’re at the center of the whole thing.”

In this neighborhood of about 200 homes and in the apartment complexes just up the street, FBI agents went door to door all day, asking if residents had seen anyone or anything unusual in the last few weeks.

Kaplan-Piepszak said the questions were jarring.

“Why would it happen here?” she asked. “I feel we are innocent victims exposed to something frightening.”

Residents thought it was bad enough earlier this week when postal workers in nearby Hamilton were found to be infected with anthrax. Hamilton Mayor Glen Gilmore had first heard the bad news when a resident called and told him the radio was reporting that one of the earliest letters had been mailed from the Trenton area.

“There are 46 sub-post offices in this general region, but they all send their mail to us,” said Richard McClellan, a top aide to Gilmore. “Everything is distributed out of here.”

Authorities said the letter to Tom Brokaw was postmarked Sept. 18 at the main regional post office, which is in Hamilton.

During the last few days, the nation’s media and numerous law enforcement agencies have descended upon these towns, searching for those who had launched the bioterrorist attacks that created fear and panic across the country.

Television crews trundled down streets where satellite dishes brushed against oak trees. Children stared in wonder and confusion as men in black suits and blow-dried hair held forth in their neighborhoods.

So far, no one can say where the anthrax in these letters originated. “It could be from anywhere,” said James B. Golden Jr., director of the Trenton Police Department. “We’re responding to and isolating items as they come.”

Video footage from the security cameras at the post offices has been taken. Armed guards patrol the outside of the distribution center in Hamilton and occasionally question visitors as they come in to buy stamps or pick up mail.

The guards keep a half-dozen TV media vans far away.

Some customers said they’re afraid to check their mailboxes but feel they must.

“My bills aren’t going to disappear like magic,” said Andrew Rapmark, 61, as he pulled envelopes from a post office box. “Visa still wants my money. I think it’s safe to open this one.”