The specter of bioterrorism showed itself at the University on Thursday when an
emeritus physics professor received a suspicious package at his office in
Willamette Hall.
At about 9 a.m., Emeritus Professor Bernd Crasemann and his assistant opened
a brown envelope in Crasemann’s office, which is located in Room 251 of
Willamette Hall. Crasemann said the envelope — which was postmarked from
Malaysia — was addressed to him and contained a letter and an unknown
substance that he described as “granular” in texture.
The letter had writing both in English and a language that Crasemann didn’t
recognize — although he said that it was not Arabic.
“It said ‘Death to the oppressor,’ or something like that,” Crasemann said of the
English portion of the letter in a phone interview with the Emerald.
At 9:23 a.m., Crasemann called the Department of Public Safety to report the
letter. DPS called the Eugene Police Department, who sent three officers to
investigate. After assessing the situation, the EPD officers shut down the air
circulation system in Willamette Hall and called in the FBI and a HazMat
response team.
“There is an ongoing investigation,” FBI public relations coordinator Beth Anne
Steele said. But Steele was quick to point out that “there has been no evidence
of a credible threat in Oregon since Sept. 11.
“If we discover that it is anthrax, we’ll make a public announcement
immediately.”
At 4:15 p.m., a University employee was admitted to McKenzie-Willamette
Hospital in Springfield. The man said he feared he had been exposed to the
substance while handling the letter. He was treated and discharged from the
hospital at 6 p.m.

After the FBI and EPD had collected evidence and samples of the substance for
testing, the HazMat team began a decontamination of Willamette Hall, a process
that involves cleaning potentially contaminated surfaces with bleach.
Joan Saylor, an administrative lieutenant with DPS, said the situation is under
control and there is no threat to students. University Health Center director Dr.
Gerald Fleischli said the area of exposure was contained quickly enough that
people who may have been in Willamette Hall don’t need to worry about having
been exposed.
“The health risk is pretty minimal at this point,” Fleischli said. “The people who
may have been exposed — the police, the people in the office, the firefighters —
have been taken care of.”
University officials said there is no threat to the campus mail system because the
letter was delivered directly to Willamette Hall by the U.S. Postal Service. The
building, which houses the physics and general science departments, was
never entirely closed and was not evacuated; however, Crasemann and his
assistant were sent home. Other employees in the building were told they were
free to go home if they wished.
Saylor said two student workers were present in a room adjacent to
Crasemann’s office when police arrived on the scene. Police feared the two
might have been exposed to the substance when they entered Crasemann’s
office during the morning. The students were decontaminated by the HazMat
team and released.
Crasemann said he had no idea why the letter had been sent to him, but joked
that as editor of Physical Review A, a monthly physics journal published by the
American Physical Society, he often has to reject manuscripts submitted by
authors from around the world.
“There are a bunch of unhappy authors around the world,” he said, adding that
the postmark looked genuine to him. “They write angry letters, but I don’t know
that anyone would go this far.” Saylor said DPS has been contacted four to six
times by people with concerns relating to anthrax. Officers were dispatched in
two of those instances, but both were found to be false alarms. One of the cases
was found to be nothing more than a crushed Tic-Tac.
The FBI said that it will take about 72 hours to test the substance taken from
Willamette Hall for biological agents. In the meantime, the University has
established a hotline, 346-5692, which will be updated regularly as information
becomes available.