LAS VEGAS (AP) - Authorities said Wednesday they discovered a small amount of the lethal toxin ricin in an apartment not far from the Las Vegas Strip where a man was found dead Monday of a possible drug overdose.
“This was contained,” Dr. Joseph Iser, Southern Nevada Health District chief health officer, told reporters several hours after the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the discovery of the poison that can be easily inhaled and has no antidote.
“There is no public health threat,” Iser said of a discovery that brought comparisons to a ricin find in Las Vegas in 2008 that resulted in a man serving federal prison time. “There is no releasable kind of ricin that anyone should be worried about.”
Deputy Las Vegas Police Chief Christopher Darcy said police, fire and health officials and the FBI have not found more ricin anywhere and first responders, neighbors and the man’s roommate have been checked and haven’t shown evidence of exposure.
Darcy said a roommate found Matthew Joel Friedman, a 36-year-old former Las Vegas audio-visual businessman, dead on a couch near a syringe, a spoon and a brown substance found to be heroin.
An apparent suicide note expressed “longing for death and hatred for the world,” Darcy said, but no threats to anyone else.
It was not clear how Friedman died, the officials said. A coroner’s autopsy was scheduled, but toxicology tests can take several weeks.
When police and paramedics found a bag of red castor beans, Darcy said the apartment was sealed, the surrounding neighborhood was locked down and residents were contacted and told to remain in their homes and apartments as a precaution. The police official did not estimate how many people were affected by the quarantine.
In the apartment, several samples of a small amount of soupy mash found in a coffee filter-type strainer tested positive for ricin, Darcy said. He declined to estimate a weight or volume of the substance, but said it had a consistency of wet cat litter.
“As of early this morning the scene was safe and there was no threat to the residents,” he said.
Darcy said Friedman had several unspecified traffic warrants in Nevada and Georgia and a conviction in Houston on felony credit card and fraud charges. Details and dispositions of the traffic cases were not immediately available.
Friedman recently made “disturbing statements about suicide and death” to others, Darcy said, and told his male roommate that he was dying of cancer. The roommate was not identified.
Iser said ricin is most dangerous in a powdered form that can be inhaled, but it can be ingested by mouth or intravenously.
It is found naturally in castor beans. When purified, even a very small amount can kill.
Ricin gained an exotic reputation as an assassination method after a Bulgarian dissident died from being jabbed in the thigh with a ricin-tipped umbrella point in London in 1978. No one was ever charged with the killing.
In 2008 in Las Vegas, Roger Von Bergendorff summoned an ambulance to his extended-stay hotel room for breathing trouble and was hospitalized on life support. Hotel employees later found ricin in his room, along with castor beans, guns, silencers and instructions on how to prepare ricin.
The FBI in Salt Lake City found castor beans and a makeshift laboratory with a respirator, filters, glassware, syringes and a notebook on ricin production storage units rented by Bergendorff. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in federal prison and three years of supervised release for illegal possession of a biological toxin and weapon charges.
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