Post Office Supervisor Says Suspicious Spill Ruined His Health
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
By: Steve Newborn

May 15, 2012 | WMFE - One year ago, a postal worker in Orlando says he handled a suspicious package from Yemen and he says it made him seriously ill. The Postal Service denies the incident ever took place. The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative Reporting Program at University of California, Berkeley worked with reporter Steve Newborn of WUSF in Tampa to try to uncover what really happened.

Jeff Lill lies on a hospital bed in his mother's home just north of Rochester, N.Y. He's wrapped in a blanket, and his hands are shaking. His mom, Janet Vieau, brings him some hot tea and asks if she should reheat the bean bag that's his heating pad.

"Do you want me to warm them up?” She ask her son. " No, I'm fine. I'm just tired," he replies. "Well, have something to eat," she continues.

Lill says he wants to sleep. He does a lot of that. Some days, he'll sleep 16 hours.

"I feel like a 95-year-old person with Alzheimer's," he says. "I just feel horrible."

The 44-year-old says he wasn't always like this. Last February, he was working as a supervisor for the U.S. Postal Service at an Orlando sorting facility. One day he noticed a stench coming from a package.

No one else has ever verified this, but Lill says the return address on the package said "Yemen." Four months earlier, two bombs from Yemen had been sent through FedEx and UPS.

Lill says this package was leaking a brown ooze.

"It was, wow, I'm searching for words , ….. caustic," he says, slowly. "Thick."

"It was something like - benzene - something very, very strong. I never smelled that smell," says Paz Oquendo, who worked at the annex with Lill. She's one of three eyewitnesses who back Lill's account.

Lill says he grabbed the package, put it in a canvas bag and took it outside the building to a “haz-mat” shed. He admits he ignored the usual procedure for handling toxic substances.

"I knew that I broke protocol," he says, "but rather than evacuate the entire building and wait 30, 40, 50 minutes or an hour for responders to come and take a look at it, I basically evacuated the area and ran everybody out of the building."

Lill says he started feeling sick almost immediately. His mother steps in to describe what happened next.

"He had a horrible headache, instantly, as soon as he leaned over this package," she says from her home in Rochester. "And a sensation of burning in his nose and his throat that was very, very intense. As he came back to the building, he noticed that his forearms were, like, itching and tingling."

Lill says he couldn't keep food down and his esophagus felt like it was on fire. He was forced to quit work and move in with his mother.

His doctor says there's something wrong with him, but he doesn't know exactly what. He can't diagnose his disease until he knows what Lill was exposed to.

And they can't tell him, because the Postal Service says the spill never happened.

Postal officials did not return several phone calls and e-mails asking for information about Lill. But in a March letter, a Postal Service lawyer says there was no hazardous spill on February 4, 2011 at the Orlando facility.

He lays out an alternative explanation: the lingering odor from a spill of some disinfectant two days earlier.

But three of Lill's co-workers back up his version of the story.