(Photo: Stock.xchng.)

By Howard Goodman
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

The state’s first round of standardized test scores are in, and the answer is: Consternation!

As most Florida parents probably know by now, only 27 percent of fourth-graders passed this year’s writing test, which entailed composing a short essay based on a prompt. This represented a plunge of deep-sea proportions. Last year, 81 percent of the state’s fourth-graders passed the test.

Schools screamed that they were being tarred unfairly as losers — and with so much riding on standardized test results these days, no one can afford that label. Third-graders must pass FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) in reading to move to the next grade. High school students can’t get a diploma without passing the FCAT.

The state Board of Education met in emergency session on Tuesday. And with the pressure on, with hundreds of outraged spectators on hand, they solved the problem by simple math. They redefined failure. Instead of a 4 being the minimum passing grade on the 1-6 scale, they deemed 3 the passing score.

Presto. Eighty-one percent of fourth-graders now passed the test.

(Similar drops hit eighth and 10th graders. And there were similar instant improvements, once the passing score was shifted from 4 to 3.)

Did the kids get suddenly dumber year on year? Of course not. No more than they got immediately smarter upon the board’s vote that made a lower score good enough for passing.

Everyone seems placated for the moment. Because the consequences of widespread failures are too severe. “Students, teachers, principals, administrators, superintendents, even school board members, all know they’re judged by the outcomes of tests,” as Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm put it.

The most immediate worry, to judge by teachers’ and administrators’ quotes in news stories, is that more horrible test scores are on their way. That’s because the the state had ordered more rigorous requirements in a number of subjects, but did it “at warp speed without the appropriate time to train educators on the new requirements, and ignoring each student’s year to year improvement,” the Herald’s editorial board said.

“The time left to actually educate students, to teach them to reason and comprehend, is less and less each year,” said teacher Sandra Andrews of Bonita Springs Middle School.

That is the nub of it, and that is the harder question to deal with. This year’s writing scores stank largely because, for the first time, students were graded on punctuation and spelling, the News-Press said. That seems only proper. It’s how students’ writing would be judged by a future college admissions officer or by an employer.

OK, then. Crisis averted. The state has decreed that 80-some percent of Florida students can now write at an acceptable level.But to believe that is to believe in fantasy. As we’ve shown before, the United States ranks pitifully low among the other nations on student performance.

Florida has taken the general approach of spending as little on public education while testing as much as possible and ratcheting up the pressure to perform.

How’s that working out for us so far?

Janet Vieau reported her son's illness to OSHA in February. (Photo by J.J. Barrow.)

By Trevor Aaronson
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency charged with monitoring worker safety, is investigating the illness of a U.S. Postal Service employee who handled a leaking package from Yemen at an Orlando mail-sorting facility.

The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting first reported that Jeffrey A. Lill experienced health problems after handling the parcel, which was leaking a brown viscous substance. Lill, 44, suffers from extreme fatigue, tremors, and liver and neurological problems consistent with toxic exposure.

Jeffrey A. Lill. (Photo by J.J. Barrow.)

But USPS has refused to investigate what happened to Lill, stating through lawyers that the incident never occurred. But FCIR, in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley, uncovered related documents and interviewed two whistleblowers who confirmed what happened.

Following FCIR’s report — which was published May 13 in the Miami Herald, The Ledger of Lakeland, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, as well as in more than 250 newspapers worldwide through Associated Press distribution — Michael D’Aquino, a spokesman for OSHA’s southeast regional office, confirmed the agency is looking into what made Lill sick.

D’Aquino said OSHA began its investigation in April, when he said investigators first received a complaint. But records show Lill’s mother, Janet Vieau, filed a complaint in February. Either way, OSHA’s investigation will likely be toothless, since federal law prohibits the agency from issuing citations for incidents that are more than six months old. Lill and two witnesses said the package came through Orlando on Feb. 4, 2011.

Vieau, 64, a real estate agent in Rochester, N.Y., said she has been calling OSHA for months to encourage them to investigate her son’s illness.

“I’ve spoken to OSHA a number of times, and each time, they just flipped me off,” Vieau said. An OSHA representative had told Vieau that the agency would not investigate because the incident had occurred more than six months ago.

This is the first time Vieau has heard of an active OSHA investigation, which she attributes to the media attention her son’s case has received.

“I’m beginning to think that as a result of what you’ve done, there will be an exception to the rule,” she said. “Before now, OSHA told me quite frankly that six months was up and sorry.”

Here’s an update on the FAMU marching band’s difficulties:

The school has ruled the famed Marching 100 should remain suspended for at least another year.

FAMU President James Ammons said the band should stay off the field at least until a new band director is hired and new rules for the band have been adopted, the Associated Press reported.

Eleven FAMU band members face felony charges in the November hazing death of Robert Champion, while two others face misdemeanor counts. The band has been banned from performing since soon after he died, and the band director Julian White recently retired after it was revealed that at least 100 band members were not students when Champion died.

Related:

• After Package From Yemen, Questions About Worker Illness and Government Response

Due to his illness, Jeffrey A. Lill sleeps up to 16 hours a day in a hospital bed in Rochester, N.Y. (Photo by J.J. Barrow.)

By J.J. Barrow and Trevor Aaronson
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Paz Oquendo, a worker at the U.S. Postal Service’s Orlando sorting facility, smelled the noxious odor first. It was Feb. 4, 2011, and the foul stench was coming from one of the large mailbags hanging near the package-conveyor belts.

She ran over to Jeffrey A. Lill, the shift supervisor who was monitoring the sorting from a platform, and reported the smell.

“I can’t breathe,” Oquendo told Lill.

Lill headed toward the center of the sorting floor — an area workers call “the belly” — to investigate the odor.

Then he smelled it — a strong chemical stench he couldn’t identify. It was coming from a bag wet with a brown viscous substance. Lill looked in the wet sack and saw a broken package with tubes and wires sticking out. He remembers reading the return address with surprise: Yemen. Four months earlier, two bombs from Yemen had been sent through FedEx and UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service had alerted everyone to be on the lookout for packages coming from the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula.

Fearing the package was a hazard, Lill ordered the 40 postal employees out of the belly and immediately opened the large bay doors to ventilate the facility. Lill then moved the bag to a cart and pushed it outside to the hazmat shed.

After the package was out of the building, Lill radioed his manager to notify her of the suspicious spill. She told him the next on-duty supervisor would finish handling the incident.

Lill’s throat burned, and the gas had given him a headache. He called his mother in Rochester, N.Y.

“I want you know what happened at the Post Office,” Janet Vieau, 64, a real estate agent, remembered him telling her. “It might be on the news.”

But the incident never made the news. In fact, USPS did not investigate the suspicious package as a security or health threat and did not report it to the Department of Homeland Security, as is the protocol.

The package, now missing, has created a mystery — and solving that mystery could be the key to saving Lill’s life. In the weeks after his exposure to the package, Lill fell devastatingly and inexplicably ill. He suffers from extreme fatigue, tremors, and liver and neurological problems consistent with toxic exposure. He has become so sick that he cannot work and now must be cared for his by mother in New York. Lill’s doctors say they have no way to treat him without knowing what chemicals were inside the package.

All the while, USPS has refused to investigate, stating through lawyers that the incident never occurred. But the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, in partnership with the News21 project of the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley, uncovered related documents and interviewed two whistleblowers who confirm what happened on Feb. 4, 2011 — showing that USPS has refused to investigate not only the potential cause for the illness of an employee, but also what could have been a chemical weapon in Florida.

“I think they’ve just been protecting themselves,” said George Chuzi, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, who is helping Lill and his family pressure USPS to investigate. “If we’re right, they didn’t do something they were supposed to do.”

*     *     *

Today, Lill, 44, lives with his mother in Rochester, N.Y. In a bedroom painted blue, with lights off and curtains drawn, Lill sleeps up to 16 hours a day in a hospital bed.

“He was so vital, so energetic and so personable,” said Vieau, his mother. “He would play basketball and the drums.”

But now Lill is bedridden. “He can watch a DVD, and that’s about it,” Vieau said.

Within two weeks of the Feb. 4, 2011, incident, Lill came down with flu symptoms. He also had insomnia and was disoriented. “It would go away, but each time it came back, it would come back longer,” Lill said, lying in bed with thick curtains blocking out a sunny afternoon in late March — more than a year after the incident.

Janet Vieau reviews files related to her efforts to pressure the U.S. Postal Service to determine what chemicals were in the package her son handled in February 2011. (Photo by J.J. Barrow.)

By June 2011, Lill’s symptoms intensified. He had lost 25 pounds from his trim frame. His liver and appendix were inflamed. He wound up in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer and esophagus. The next month, Lill sat in the dark in his home in Lady Lake, Fla., unable to get out of his recliner and spend time with the two teenagers under his care: his own 17-year-old son and the son of a friend under his guardianship. Lill is divorced.

In his decade of working for USPS, Lill rarely missed a day on the job. But by August 2011, he began what’s become a permanent medical leave.

The next month, Lill’s gallbladder was removed in an attempt to give him relief from his nausea and stomach pain. Days after the procedure, his symptoms returned. Doctors couldn’t explain why. By the end of September, Lill’s mother realized her son could not take care of himself anymore, and she brought him to New York.

Vieau now works in a home office next to Lill’s bedroom, constantly listening in case he is stricken with tremors. “I’ll hear things shaking,” she said. “I have to comfort him, to hold him.”

Lill’s exposure to the suspicious package appears to be the only answer left to his unexplainable health problems. He’s seen more than two dozen doctors, including toxicologists and neurologists, and none has been able to diagnose his illness.

“Unless we know exactly what Jeff was exposed to, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Richard Aguirre, one of Lill’s doctors. “If we knew what the toxin is, we could work back and try to find a cure.”

But to this day, USPS denies that Lill was exposed to a potentially toxic package from Yemen.

In a March 9 letter to Chuzi, USPS lawyer Isabel M. Robison acknowledged that a harmless spill had occurred on Feb. 2, 2011, but said nothing was spilled on Feb. 4, 2011. She wrote: “A review of Postal Service records and multiple inquiries at both the Area and District levels has confirmed — as we previously indicated — that there was no hazardous spill on February 4, 2011 at the Orlando MP Annex.”

*     *     *

After her shift at the USPS facility in Orlando on an April evening, Paz Oquendo sat on a couch in a hotel room on International Drive. Next to her was coworker Yolanda Ocasio. At the risk of losing their jobs, Oquendo and Ocasio said USPS is lying and covering up the incident. They were there when Lill removed the noxious package from Yemen.

“I don’t understand why the Post Office won’t admit that it happened and do something to help Jeff,” Oquendo said.

In interviews with FCIR, Oquendo and Ocasio confirmed in detail Lill’s recounting of what occurred in Orlando on Feb. 4, 2011. FCIR also obtained a time-stamped email Lill sent to his supervisor, Cynthia Hickman, reporting the exposure to a potentially toxic substance that day. (Hickman did not respond to requests for comment.)

Why, despite paper records and two whistleblowers’ accounts, USPS refuses to investigate the incident is something of a whodunit. But it’s also a national security concern, demonstrating how USPS may not have investigated a potential terrorist attack in Florida.

In October 2010, four months before Lill came in contact with the package, authorities intercepted two packages from Yemen with bomb materials hidden inside printer ink cartridges. One was discovered in Britain aboard a UPS cargo plane and the other was found in a FedEx warehouse in Dubai. USPS briefly stopped accepting mail from the country. Yemeni police then arrested a suspect in the case, and deliveries from Yemen to the United States resumed.

But USPS being on the front lines of counterterrorism is nothing new. Since the 2001 anthrax attacks — during which anthrax-laced letters were mailed to news media and two U.S. Senators, killing five and infecting 17 others — USPS has been on alert for the next attack.

That’s why U.S. Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, R-N.Y., wants answers about what happened in Orlando on Feb. 4, 2011. Buerkle, whose district includes Lill’s new residence in Rochester, has pressured USPS to investigate what she views as a credible report of a possible chemical weapon.

“We are not satisfied with the level of responsiveness from the Postal Service,” said Timothy Drumm, Buerkle’s chief of staff. “We want to see if the appropriate steps were taken by the Post Office, to see if the employees are safe. But since they say the incident did not happen, we can’t even get that far.”

USPS officials in Washington, D.C., and Florida declined to comment on Buerkle’s call for an inquiry and on the two whistleblowers who have come forward.

*     *     *

When Lill is awake and lucid, he expresses frustration that his employer won’t acknowledge the incident that may have made him so ill.

Squeezing his eyes shut, his hand trembling, Lill admitted he didn’t follow protocol for handling a spill. Rushing to protect fellow employees, Lill did not follow USPS rules that required him to put on a protective suit before handling the parcel. Because of that, he said, liquid from the package touched his skin. It was brown, syrupy and difficult to wash off.

“I wanted to make sure they got out because one employee had gotten a headache and I got mine pretty quickly,” Lill said. “If I had followed the rules, I guess we would have had a lot more people exposed to it.”

Lill has good and bad days. During the bad ones, he struggles to distinguish reality from dream.
“I’ve heard him speaking Spanish in his room, to nobody,” Vieau said, referring to how her son learned Spanish while working at USPS. “Sometimes he’ll laugh and smile and gesture. But he’s not there.”

Lill’s doctors say his symptoms are consistent with exposure to a neurotoxin. To identify which neurotoxin, Lill needs USPS to acknowledge the incident, determine whether the package is in USPS’s possession or was transferred from the hazmat shed to a third-party contractor’s landfill in Kentucky, and then test its contents.

He’s hopeful that if they can find the package, he could be well again.

“I just want my health to be the way it was,” Lill said.

Debido a su enfermedad, Jeffrey A. Lill duerme hasta 16 horas diarias en una cama de hospital en Rochester, Nueva York. (Foto de J.J. Barrow.)

Por J.J. Barrow and Trevor Aaronson
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Paz Oquendo, trabajadora de la instalación de clasificación del Servicio de Correos de Estados Unidos (USPS) en Orlando, primero detectó un olor fuerte. Era el 4 de febrero del 2011, y el fuerte olor salía de una de las bolsas grandes de correspondencia que colgaban cerca de las cintras transportadoras de paquetes.

Oquendo se dirigió a Jeffrey A. Lill, el supervisor de 44 años que controlaba el trabajo desde una plataforma, y le dijo del olor.

“No puedo respirar”, le dijo Oquendo a Lill.

Lill bajó al piso — un área que los empleados llaman “la panza” — para investigar.

Entonces lo detectó, un olor fuerte a sustancia química que no pudo identificar y que salía de una bolsa mojada con una sustancia viscosa color marrón. Lill miró dentro de la bolsa y vio un paquete roto con tubos y cables a la vista. Recuerda haber leído con sorpresa la dirección del remitente: Yemen. Cuatro meses antes, dos bombas enviadas desde Yemen a través de FedEx y UPS, habían hecho que el Servicio Postal alertada a todos a estar atentos a los paquetes procedentes del extreme sur de la Península Arábica.

Temiendo que el paquete fuera peligroso, Lill ordenó a los 40 empleados a que salieran de inmediato del área y abrieran las grandes puertas de la instalación para ventilarla. Lill entonces colocó la bolsa en un carrito y lo empujó durante el camino de casi media milla hasta el contenedor de sustancias peligrosas.

Después de sacar la bolsa del edificio, Lill avisó por radio a su supervisora para notificarle del derrame sospechoso, quien le dijo que la próxima supervisora de turno terminaría de manejar el incidente.

A Lill le ardía la garganta y el gas que despedía la sustancia le había provocado un dolor de cabeza. Llamó a su mamá en Rochester, Nueva York.

“Quiero que sepas lo que ocurrió en la oficina de Correos”, recordó Janet Vieau, de 64 años y agente de bienes raíces, que le dijo su hijo. “A lo mejor sale en las noticias”.

Pero el incidente no generó titulares. De hecho, ni siquiera se mencionó en los medios. Lo que es más, USPS no investigó el paquete sospechoso como amenaza de seguridad o a la salud y no lo reportó al Departamento de Seguridad Interna, como incida el protocolo.

El paquete, cuyo destino se desconoce en este momento, ha creado un misterio, y solucionarlo pudiera ser la clave para salvarle la vida a Lill. En las semanas siguientes a quedar expuesto al paquete, Lill se sintió devastadora y inexplicablemente enfermo. Sufre de fatiga extrema, temblores y problemas hepáticos y neurológicos que suelen deberse a la exposición a sustancias tóxicas. Está tan mal que no puede trabajar y ahora depende de los cuidados de su madre en Nueva York. Los médicos de Lill dicen que no tienen forma de tratarlo sin saber qué sustancias contenía el paquete.

Mientras tanto, USPS se ha negado a investigar y ha expresado a través de abogados que el incidente nunca ocurrió. Pero el Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, en colaboración con el Programa de Reportaje Investigativo de la Universidad de California en Berkeley, descubrió documentos relacionados con el caso y entrevistó a dos denunciantes que confirmaron lo sucedido el 4 de febrero del 2011, lo que prueba que el Servicio de Correos se ha negado a investigar no sólo la causa potencial de la enfermedad de un empleado, sino lo que puede haber sido la presencia de un arma química en la Florida.

“Creo que se han dedicado a protegerse”, dijo George Chuzi, abogado de Washington, D.C. que ayuda a Lill y a su familia a presionar al USPS para que investigue. “Si estamos en lo correcto, no hicieron lo que debían haber hecho”.

*     *     *

Hoy, Lill vive con su madre en Rochester, Nueva York, en una habitación pintada de azul, con las luces apagadas y las cortinas cerradas. Lill duerme 16 horas diarias en una cama de hospital.

“El era muy vital, tenía mucha energía y personalidad”, dijo Vieau, su madre. “Jugaba baloncesto y tocaba percusión”.

Pero ahora Lill está permanentemente en cama. “Puede mirar un DVD, y eso es todo”, dijo Vieau.
A las dos semanas del incidente del 34 de febrero del 2011, Lill comenzó a sentir síntomas parecidos a los de influenza. Tampoco podía dormir bien y estaba desorientado. “Se le pasaba, pero los síntomas regresaban durante más tiempo”, dijo Lill desde su cama, con unas gruesas cortinas cerrando el paso a la luz una soleada tarde marzo, más de un año después del incidente.

Janet Vieau revisa documentos en un esfuerzo por presionar al Servicio de Correos a investigar la sustancia química del paquete que su hijo manejó en febrero del 2011. (Foto de J.J. Barrow.)

Para junio del 2011 los síntomas se le habían intensificado. Aunque era delgado, perdió 25 libras. Tenía el hígado y el apéndice inflamados y terminó en el hospital con una úlcera sangrante y hemorragia en el esófago. Al mes siguiente Lill estaba sentado en la oscuridad en su casa de Lady Lake, Florida, incapaz de levantarse de su butaca reclinable y dedicar tiempo a los dos adolescentes bajo su cuidado: su propio hijo de 17 años y el hijo de un amigo bajo su custodia. Lill está divorciado.

En los 10 años que trabajó para el USPS, Lill rara vez faltaba. Pero en agosto del 2011 comenzó lo que se ha convertido en una licencia médica permanente.

En septiembre le extirparon la vesícula en un intento por aliviarle las náuseas y el dolor de estómago. Días después de la operación los síntomas regresaron. Los médicos no tenían explicación. Para finales de ese mes, la madre de Lill se dio cuenta que su hijo ya no podía valerse por sí sólo y se lo llevó a Nueva York.

Vieau trabaja ahora en una oficina junto a la habitación de Lill, escuchando constantemente en caso de que le empiecen los temblores. “Escucho las cosas estremecerse”, dijo. “Tengo que ir a abrazarlo y confortarlo”.

La exposición de Lill al paquete sospechoso es la única respuesta que queda a sus inexplicables problemas de salud. Ha visto a más de 20 médicos, entre ellos especialistas en toxicología y neurología, y ninguno ha podido diagnosticarle una enfermedad.

“A menos que sepamos exactamente a qué sustancia quedó expuesto, es como encontrar una aguja en un pajar”, dijo Richard Aguirre, uno de los médicos de Lill. “Si supiéramos qué toxina es, pudiéramos tratar de encontrar una cura”.

Pero hasta hoy, el Servicio de Correos niega que Lill haya estado expuesto a un paquete potencialmente tóxico proveniente de Yemen.

En una carta del 9 de marzo a Chuzi, el abogado de la familia, la abogada del USPS Isabel M. Robison escribió: “Una revisión de los archivos del Servicio Postal y numerosas investigaciones a nivel de Area y de Distrito han confirmado, como habíamos indicado anteriormente, que el 4 de febrero del 2011 no hubo ningún derrame tóxico en el Anexo MP de Orlando”.

*     *     *

Después de terminar su turno en la instalación del USPS en Orlando una tarde de abril, Paz Oquendo está sentada en el sofá de una habitación de hotel en International Drive. Junto a ella está su colega de trabajo Yolanda Ocasio. A riesgo de perder sus empleos, Oquendo y Ocasio dijeron que el Servicio de Correos miente y que está ocultando el incidente. Ellas estaban allí cuando Lill sacó el paquete tóxico procedente de Yemen.

“No comprendo por qué el Servicio de Correos no admite lo que sucedió y hace algo para ayudar a Jeff”, dijo Oquendo.

En entrevistas con FCIR, Oquendo y Ocasio confirmaron que la versión de Lill de lo ocurrido en Orlando el 4 de febrero del 2011. El FCIR también obtuvo un mensaje electrónico que Lill envió a su supervisora (que tiene la fecha de envío), Cynthia Hickman, en que reportó la exposición a una sustancia potencialmente tóxica ese día. (Hickman no respondió a varias solicitudes de comentario).

Por qué, a pesar de los registros en papel y de las versiones de dos denunciantes, el Servicio de Correos se niega a investigar el incidente es algo inexplicable. Pero también es una preocupación potencial de seguridad nacional, que demuestra cómo el Servicio de Correos quizás no investigó un ataque terrorista potencia en la Florida.

En octubre del 2010, cuatro meses después del incidente de Lill con el paquete, las autoridades interceptaron dos bultos procedentes de Yemen con material explosivo dentro de cartuchos de tinta para impresoras. Uno fue descubierto en Gran Bretaña en un avión de UPS y el otro en un almacén de FedEx en Dubai. El Servicio de Correos dejó de aceptar por un tiempo las cartas y paquetes de ese país. Entonces la policía yemenita arrestó a un sospechoso y se reanudaron los envíos a Estados Unidos.

Pero el hecho de que el Servicio de Correos está en la primera trinchera del antiterrorismo no es nada nuevo. Desde los ataques con ántrax en el 2001 — durante los cuales cartas contaminadas con ántrax fueron enviadas a medios de noticias y a dos senadores federales demócratas, que dejaron un saldo de cinco muertos y 17 infectados — el Servicio de Correos ha estado en alerta para un nuevo ataque.

Por eso la representante federal Ann Marie Buerkle, republicana por Nueva York, quiere respuestas sobre lo que sucedió en Orlando el 4 de febrero del 2011. Buerkle, cuyo distrito incluye la casa donde vive Lill en Rochester, ha presionado al Servicio de Correos a investigar lo que ella considera un informe creíble de una posible arma química.

“No estamos satisfechos con el nivel de respuesta del Servicio de Correos”, dijo Timothy Drumm, jefe de despacho de Buerkle. “Queremos determinar si el Servicio de Correos tomó las medidas apropiadas, determinar si los empleados están seguros. Pero como ellos dicen que el incidente no ocurrió, ni siquiera podemos llegar a eso”.

Funcionarios del Servicio Postal en Washington, DC, y la Florida se negarón a comentar sobre la solicitud de Buerkle por una investigación y las alegaciones de los dos empleados del servicio postal.

*     *     *

Cuando Lill está despierto y lúcido, expresa frustración de que el Servicio de Correos no reconozca el incidente que puede haberlo afectado tanto.

Cerrando los ojos con fuerza y con temblores en las manos, Lill reconoció que no siguió el protocolo para manejar el derrame. Apurado por proteger a sus empleados, Lill no siguió las reglas que le exigían ponerse un traje protector antes de tocar el bulto postal. Por eso, dijo, el líquido del paquete le tocó la piel. Era una sustancia gruesa color marrón difícil de lavar.

“Yo quería asegurarme de que ellos salieran porque un empleado ya tenía dolor de cabeza y a mí también me comenzó a doler la cabeza rápido”, dijo Lill. “Si yo hubiera seguido las reglas, creo que hubiera habido más personas expuestas a la sustancia”.

Lill tiene días buenos y malos. En los malos batalla por distinguir la realidad de los sueños. “Lo he escuchado hablar español en su habitación, donde no había nadie”, dijo Vieau. Lill aprendió a hablar español mientras trabajaba en el Servicio de Correos. “Algunas veces se ríe y gesticula. Pero está en otra parte”.

Los médicos de Lill dicen que sus síntomas son similares a los que causa el contacto con una neurotoxina. Pero para identificar esa toxina, Lill necesita que el Servicio de Correos reconozca que el incidente ocurrió, que determine si la entidad todavía tiene el paquete o fue trasladado del área de sustancias peligrosas al basural de un contratista en Kentucky, y entonces habría que someter el contenido a pruebas.

Lill espera que si pueden encontrar el paquete él pudiera recuperarse.

“Sólo quiero estar tan saludable como antes”, dijo Lill.

Eleven members of the Florida A&M University marching band were charged with felony hazing in the November 2011 death of Robert Champion. (Photo courtesy of FAMU.)

By Howard Goodman
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Florida A&M University’s Marching 100 has long been a joyous model of high-stepping, boisterous precision. But since the hazing death of a drum major, it has been an organization in crisis, its reputation in tatters.

Yesterday, the band’s 71-year-old director, Julian White, who had wielded the baton for 14 years, announced his resignation. And the chairman of FAMU’s board, Solomon Badger, said he hopes that the university’s president, James Ammons, keeps the band suspended indefinitely.

It all increases the likelihood that the famed band won’t take the field next year to dazzle with half-time shows, as it has so many times in a 120-year history that includes appearances at Super Bowls and inaugural parades.

Ammons is slated to discuss the band’s fate at a special meeting Monday.

“I would like to hear him say the band is suspended indefinitely until sufficient time has lapsed and enough has been done to make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” Badger said. “The time to fix the band would not be while the band is on the field.”

Last week, 11 members of the band were charged with felony hazing in the November 2011 death of Robert Champion, and two others were charged with misdemeanors. Champion, 26, died following a ritual on a bus in which he was allegedly hit and struck by fellow band members.

This week, officials disclosed that about 100 members of the band — which actually numbers about 450 members — were not actually FAMU students at the time Champion died.

It all suggests an organization that had turned a blind eye on a dangerous and needless student rite, that was exercising too little supervision of the young people wearing its uniforms, and — like some athletic departments that become supreme in their college towns — possibly operated too much like a separate and untouchable entity at the historically black university.

The band goes by the motto: “A role model of excellence.” But according to an Associated Press investigation earlier this year that involved hundreds of pages of records, years of repeated warnings about brutal hazing passed without any serious response from  Florida A&M University’s leadership until last November’s beating death.

The AP said:

Police files show that since 2007 nearly two dozen incidents involving the band, fraternities and other student groups have been investigated. But it wasn’t until Champion’s death that the band director was initially fired, the band was suspended, student clubs were halted from recruiting new members and an anti-hazing task force was assembled.

[Numerous] parents over the last several years wrote or called university administrators, band officials or police begging someone at FAMU to keep their son or daughter safe.

“After 1 month at FAMU he is broken, indecisive, sad, confused and he wants to come home,” parent Cheryl Walker emailed Ammons. ” … My son will not quit school, you will not break him, I will see to that but FAMU has lost a hell of a young man and after this semester he will not be back. I pray that GOD will give the administration wisdom and courage to stand up against the stupid idiotic practices that go on (at) this FAMU campus.”

Emails show that the hazing was clearly known as a problem to various school officials.

William Hudson, a FAMU administrator, wrote to then-vice president for student affairs Roland Gaines in 2009 and asked “Do you think we can have the police talk to the band and put the fear of GOD in them? Even ride by the field during practice?”

But little was done to change the culture. Police investigations went nowhere because students, even those victimized by hazing, refused to cooperate. “Police investigations into hazing were so commonplace that FAMU police even had a ‘band hazing questionnaire’ that it submitted to students. And it appears that hazing wasn’t just limited to current band members. Julian White — band director at the time of Champion’s death — wrote an email to band alumni asking them to refrain from hazing current students,” the AP’s Gary Fineout wrote in his March 24 report.

The AP found other victims of the band’s violent rituals:

In 1998, Ivery Luckey, a clarinet player from Ocala was hospitalized with kidney damage after being paddled in the initiation to join a group known as “The Clones.”

Three years later, band member Marcus Parker was hospitalized with kidney damage after being paddled.

A few weeks before Champion’s death, band member Bria Hunter was hospitalized with a broken leg and blood clots in what authorities say was another act of hazing. Three band members have been charged.

In September, more aspiring “Clones” members were punched and paddled, leading to charges in January against four band members.

No single blow killed Champion, authorities said. Rather, his death was caused by multiple blows from many individuals — hence, the charges against 13 people for hazing, not the more serious charges of manslaughter or second-degree murder.

Champion’s parents, meantime, say the band should be disbanded until the “hazing culture” is rooted out.

USA Today‘s Larry Copeland reports:

“FAMU cannot go on with business as usual,” said Champion’s mother, Pam Champion. “They need to clean house. If you don’t clean the filth out, it just stays there.”

She and Champion’s father, Robert Champion Sr., and their attorney, Christopher Chestnut, said FAMU alumni helped students who were on the bus with their son to shape their stories. “We have learned that there was a calculated conspiracy to cover up Robert Champion’s murder,” Chestnut said. “We have learned that alumni were communicating with students on that bus, telling them what to say.”

Chestnut said he got that information from some of the students involved, who told his investigators that they were instructed by FAMU alumni what to say and not to say and how to say it “in order to ensure that no one would be arrested and charged for murder. That is simply inexcusable.”

FAMU did not respond to a request for comment on the Champions’ allegation. FAMU president James Ammons and board chairman Solomon Badger said in a joint statement that the school was working “vigorously” to eradicate hazing.

A gay couple marries in San Francisco City Hall on June 17, 2008. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons.)

By Howard Goodman
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

With Barack Obama making presidential history by declaring his support for same-sex marriages, it’s a good time to look where gay marriage rests in Florida.

Quick answer: It wouldn’t win in a vote.

According to Public Policy Polling, 53 percent of Floridians oppose gay marriage and only 37 percent support it. That’s according to a July 2011 survey of 848 Florida voters by the Raleigh, N.C.-based pollster — apparently the most recent poll available.

That same survey did indicate some leeway on the issue. When the question was asked in a different way, 33 percent said they thought gay couples should be allowed to marry legally, and another 34 percent said they should be allowed to form civil unions but not marry. Thirty-one percent said there should be no legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship.

Age was a big factor in attitudes. Younger people, age 18-29, said they are fine with legalizing gay marriage by a margin of 47-44. In the age group 30-45, the margin rose to 51 percent in favor, 42 percent opposed.

But in the age group 46-65, only 34 percent approved of legalizing gay marriage; 56 percent opposed it. And people over 65? A mere 22 percent said gay marriage should be legal, while a whopping 65 percent said no.

(And Florida, of course, has a lot of old people — 2.8 million over age 65, or almost 18 percent, the largest proportion of any state, according to the 2000 Census.)

Florida’s acceptance of gay marriage lags significantly behind the nation’s as a whole. According to a Gallup poll released this month, Americans backing gay marriage outnumbered opponents, 50 percent to 48 percent, with 2 percent undecided. A Pew Research Center poll released in April also shows winning support for gay marriage, with 47 percent of Americans in favor and 43 percent opposed. As recently as 2008, the same poll showed a majority were opposed. In that short time, support for same-sex marriage jumped 16 points.

Same-sex marriages, as well as civil unions and domestic partnerships for gays, are not recognized under Florida law. In 2008, voters approved a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and civil unions with 62 percent of the vote — making Florida one of 31 states where voters have put a constitutional bar on what many proponents call a civil right but what opponents call an assault on tradition and religion.

Nevertheless, some cities and counties have pushed the issue on their own, including Orlando and Tampa, which have created domestic partnership registries. Unmarried couples — both gay and straight — who sign up are granted some of the same rights as married men and women, including hospital visitations, rights to health care decisions and joint guardianship of children.

A Palm Beach County elections worker inspects a potential hanging chad following the 2000 presidential election. (Photo courtesy of State Library and Archives of Florida.)

By Howard Goodman
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Twelve years after Bush v. Gore, Palm Beach County still faces serious problems with its voting machines.

A Palm Beach Post investigation reveals that although Palm Beach County has spent more than $20 million on electronic voting systems to replace the discredited punch-card ballots of hanging-chad infamy, its current high-tech equipment cannot be fully trusted to perform the most basic tasks: count votes correctly and keep them secure.

This is the conclusion of computer scientists in California who tested the equipment, which was created by Sequoia Voting Systems but now owned by Dominion Voting Systems, the Post found.

Flaws weren’t confined to the laboratory. Four times in the last four years, ballot-counting went awry in local elections that used the Sequoia equipment:

• In a West Palm Beach City Commission special election in June 2008, almost 700 votes from three precincts — or 14 per cent of the ballots cast — were not counted. “Memory cartridges had been read by machines twice instead of once during pre-election testing. So when actual votes were entered, a tabulating system prevented them from being counted, placing them in a special file. Election staff did not know to look at the special file.” The snafu didn’t change the election’s outcome.

• In a county judicial election in August 2008, two voting machines counted the same number of paper ballots and came up with different totals. First, William Abramson led by 17 votes. After a machine recount, Richard Wennet led by 60 votes. Then nearly 3,500 votes “disappeared” — a combination of a faulty memory cartridge and human error. When the missing votes were found, Abramson was declared winner by 61 votes.

• In the Indian River County presidential primary in August 2008, more than 10,000 votes were counted twice.

• In Wellington village elections in March 2012, results were swapped among two council seats and the mayor’s race, causing two village council seat losers to be declared winners. “The elections supervisor blamed the software; the software maker denied responsibility.”

With Florida shaping up once again to be a major swing state in a presidential election, these flaws are of more than local interest.

“Wellington better be a wake-up call,” Ion Sancho, Leon County’s elections supervisor and an outspoken critic of the state’s election procedures, told the Post. “We should not take this process for granted.”

Reporters Pat Beall and Adam Playford say it is impossible to know how many problems have been corrected — Dominion Voting Systems declined to answer questions, saying only that the system has improved. The company doesn’t have to talk. Its processes are considered business secrets — one of the downsides of turning over the public’s elections machinery to private hands.

Unfortunately, the state’s problems with its voting machinery are much more complicated than a few upgrades, the Post reporters write:

• The California study found that other systems were equally flawed. And experts’ scrutiny of voting software has unearthed problems with virtually every technology and product, even as a federal agency established to provide oversight is so weak that its White House-appointed board has no members.

• Paper ballots are widely considered better than both punch cards and touch-screen equipment. Yet this is largely true only because the original votes can be counted again – and Florida law sharply restricts audits and recounts.

The Post pursued the story after investigative reporter Beall became curious about what had caused the Wellington snafu. She started digging and found a California study highly critical of the Sequoia equipment — a study that had been published months before Palm Beach County bought the system. She teamed with Playford, an investigative reporter and computer programmer.

Their series, which began on Sunday, continues in the Post‘s print editions Monday and Tuesday.

A business paradise? Chief Executive magazine says so. (Photo: Visit Florida.)

By Howard Goodman
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Here’s one group that really, really likes Florida:

CEOs

The state is ranked as the second-best in America in which to do business, according to a survey of 650 business leaders by Chief Executive magazine. Florida overtook North Carolina, last year’s No. 2, which fell to the third spot.

Texas ranked first for the eighth year in a row in this survey, which asked executives to grade the 50 states in a number of categories, including taxes and regulations, quality of the workforce and “living environment.”

“Last year, Florida Gov. Rick Scott penned a tongue-in-cheek letter to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, warning him that Florida is coming after the Lone Star State’s top ranking,” JP Donlon, the magazine’s editor wrote in announcing the rankings this week.

“Since Scott took office, his administration has enacted business tax and regulatory reforms that have contributed to the creation of more than 140,000 private sector jobs and an unemployment drop of 2.1 percentage points last year — one of the biggest decreases in the nation.

“It is perhaps no coincidence that Texas and Florida have the highest net migration of people to their states from 2001 to 2009,” Donlon added — although that time period preceded Scott’s time in office, which started in January 2011, so perhaps it is a coincidence.

“(By contrast, New York and California lost over 1.6 million and 1.5 million in net migration out of the states, respectively, over the same period.) People migrate in search of employment, but this can cut both ways.”

Other high-ranking states on the survey are Tennessee, Indiana and Virginia.

The worst states, according to the surveyed CEOs: Michigan, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York and (the very worst) California.

Since February 2001, shortly after Scott took over, Florida has added 72,300 jobs,, ranking fourth among states with significant employment changes, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In March, Florida gained 10,800 jobs.

Scott, a former CEO of America’s biggest for-profit healthcare company and whose first attempt at public office was to run for governor, promised to add 700,000 jobs over seven years if elected. As FCIR previously reported, most of the jobs created under Scott’s tenure are in the lowest-paying sectors, wages have decreased for workers at the bottom, poverty has increased and there was scant evidence that Scott’s policies had anything do with the state’s added jobs in 2011.

One of the commenters to Donlon’s online posting about the survey, David Waymire, of Lansing, Mich., offered an interesting rebuttal to the survey’s cheery conclusions:

Interesting that the states with the best rankings here have the lowest per capita incomes, highest poverty rates, and in the case of Texas, one of the highest percentages of people with no health insurance. Also by and large have a history of lax environmental regulation, contributing to the fact that residents of these highly ranks states also tend to have shorter life spans. Meanwhile, look at where CEOs choose to live, based on the number of millionaires per 100,000 persons…they live in the states that have low rankings. California, New York, New Jersey, Conn., Mass. So, the bottom line: Make your state a place where CEOs like to put their business and you can expect a poor quality of life and low paychecks. Make your state a place where CEOs like to live, and you can expect a better quality of life, higher paychecks and a longer life. How do people take this stuff seriously?