LAS VEGAS — A man who stayed in a Las Vegas
hotel room where ricin was found on Thursday has been hospitalized
in critical condition since Feb. 14 with symptoms consistent with
exposure to the deadly poison, the police said Friday.
The man’s identity, age and hometown were being withheld as
investigators tried to determine why ricin, as well as castor
beans from which is it derived, was found in the room at an
Extended Stay America hotel one mile west of the Strip.
The city’s deputy police chief for homeland security, Kathleen
Suey, said the man had been staying in the room where the ricin
was found for an unknown length of time and was still renting
the room when the substance was discovered. A man said to be
a relative or friend of the sick man had gone into the room
on Thursday afternoon to retrieve the patient’s belongings when
he found vials of white powder and showed them to the hotel’s
manager, Chief Suey said, and the police were summoned.
Initial laboratory tests indicated that the powdery substance
was ricin, a deadly poison made from the waste left over from
processing beans of the common weed castor. Further tests conducted
Friday confirmed those results.
Police said that firearms and an “anarchist-type textbook”
also were found in the room, according to The Associated Press.
After the powder was found, authorities emptied the hotel.
Seven people who had been near the ricin were taken to local
hospitals but released when they showed no signs of exposure,
Chief Suey said. The hotel was reopened early Friday after public
health officials determined that they had removed all the ricin,
which can be extremely lethal. As little as 500 micrograms,
about the size of the head of a pin, can kill a human if it
is ingested or injected, according to the Web site of the federal
Centers for Disease Control.
The man who is ill had been hospitalized after complaining
of respiratory distress but did not indicate to doctors that
he may have been exposed to ricin, so county health officials
and the police were never notified, Chief Suey said.
The patient is believed to be unconscious and has not yet
been questioned, she said.
An F.B.I. national spokesman, Special Agent Richard Kolko,
said that “based on the information gathered so far,” the events
did not appear to be related to terrorism. Still, Chief Suey
could not explain why the ricin was present or what its intended
use might have been.
“Ricin has no medical uses other than cancer research,” said
Capt. Joseph Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s
domestic security unit. “An individual citizen other than being
involved in cancer research or cancer prevention would not have
any legal means or proper means of having that.”
Dr. Nicholas J. Vogelzang, director of the Nevada Cancer Institute,
said that none of his researchers use the substance and that
nobody involved with the institute had stayed at the hotel in
recent months, if ever.
“We’re not doing anything here with it,” Dr. Vogelzang said.
“It’s not a currently active treatment,” he said, explaining
that most cancer researchers have abandoned experimenting with
it because it is so dangerous.
Executives at resorts and casinos all along the Strip were
watching the developments carefully. A scheduled weekly conference
call between the police and heads of casino security Friday
included a statement from police officials that the ricin incident
was “very contained and isolated,” said a spokesman for Harrah’s
Entertainment, Gary Thompson, whose company owns the Rio All-Suites
Casino & Resort and Caesars Palace. Both are within a mile of
the Extended Stay America hotel.
That the incident occurred off the Strip was a slight relief
for resort owners.
“Yeah, I suppose you could say that, but I think it’s a shame
that happened at all,” Mr. Thompson said. “It’s alarming that
this material is out there and somebody is ill.”
In February 2004, ricin was found in the mailroom of the Senate
majority leader at the time, Bill Frist of Tennessee. The discovery
shut three Senate buildings for up to a week, but none of the
dozens of people in the vicinity reported becoming ill.
In 2003, a 60-year-old former gambling executive and chemist
here used ricin to commit suicide. The man, Tomoo Okada, told
emergency responders that he had injected himself at his home
with the poison, which prompted two hospital emergency rooms
that saw him to be closed for about three hours.
This is the second major public health scare in Las Vegas
this week. On Wednesday, the Southern Nevada Health District
sent out as many as 40,000 letters to people who may have been
exposed to hepatitis C at a local clinic after it was discovered
that the clinic, the Endoscopy Center of Nevada, was reusing
syringes as standard procedure since May 2004. The scale of
the potential problem prompted the nation’s largest public notification
involving the reuse of syringes in American history, according
to the C.D.C.
