Community Seeking Answers Gets Only Cautionary Advice

They came with questions and left with uncertainty, these residents of a blue-collar town shaken by anthrax.

On Wednesday night, just as the sun set, about 400 of them crammed the Ewing High School auditorium. They wanted facts. They didn’t get many.

Why aren’t you telling us which mailbox the letter contaminated with anthrax was sent from? they asked.

At least one anthrax-tainted letter is believed to have been mailed from this suburban enclave west of Trenton.

“I’m not saying,” said New Jersey Department of Health Commissioner George T. DiFerdinando.

The stern, dark-suited officials who lined up on the high school stage were frustratingly uncommunicative. Instead of answering questions, investigators from the post office ran the audience through a prepared presentation.

Point by point, they repeated to the crowd: Don’t touch, don’t sniff, don’t open anything strange.

And above all, don’t panic.

Rosalie Comisky, 72, a Ewing resident for 55 years, asked about her chances of being infected. No one would tell her.

“This is nothing more than a lecture,” she said. “We’re supposed to sit and listen and be happy with whatever they want to tell us. It’s not enough. I didn’t get a single answer.”

FBI agent Kenneth Donovan assured the audience that the officials were “trying our best.”

“People should know that you can trust us to do the right thing,” Donovan said. “We’re in the middle of all this, just like you.”

Donovan did offer one scrap of information, that “maybe, just maybe,” the contamination of Ewing mail carrier Teresa Heller earlier this month occurred in the local post office, not while she was walking her route.

“She may have been infected when her sorting tray touched machinery that had anthrax on it,” Donovan said.

But the FBI agent refused to described the machinery, other than to say it is used to sort mail. And he would not say how the anthrax might have gotten on the machinery.

When two hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center in New York last month, terror hit the big city. When Heller was contaminated with anthrax earlier this month and then watched her arms blister with sores, the fear reached the small towns.

Most of the time, things are pretty quiet in Ewing, a town of 30,000. News here usually focuses on the biggest local problem--migrating geese that spend the night on people’s lawns, messing up the grass.

Over backyard fences, over coffee at a corner cafe, over the counter at the neighborhood hardware store, people keep saying the same thing: “This isn’t happening here.”

Rumors are everywhere, most of them unfounded.

“The last time we had this much excitement in town was in World War II, when the military parked aircraft here,” said Mary-Lou Conover, 73.

“Very little ever happens around here,” she said. “But now, all of this business is coming right into my backyard.’