Best of 2015: Bayshore Alumni Remain in the Dark on Cancer Cases

Cheryl Lumsden Jozsa is a graduate of the Bayshore High Class of 1981. She is just one among many who graduated from the Manatee County school during that era who is searching for answers regarding an inexplicably high disease rate among alumni.

When Cheryl came to me with her story, it seemed hard to believe. If the rate of incidences were so incredibly high, the documentation of records so suspiciously kept, and the remaining evidence so troubling in terms of exposure theories, something would have had to have been done, right?

Of course, I knew better. Eight years ago I ran into a fellow Army vet, who, like me, had spent time at Fort McClellan, in northeast Alabama. He told me how both he and his wife had suffered the same rare cancer before their 40th birthdays, though neither of them had a family history that would suggest winding up at such an unlikely outlier.

What they did have in common was 18 months at the U.S. Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Corps’ home base, before it was shut down in 1999. Over the decades, Fort McClellan had been home to virtually every substance ever used in our Army's extensive history of chemical and biological weapons, not to mention the run of the mill toxic substances commonly found (and disposed of) on 20th century U.S. military installations. One can hardly imagine the toxic soup that has lurked in its water and soil.

I was among the last graduates of the Corps’ Officer Basic Course in November of 1998. We weren’t told why the base was literally being deconstructed around us, in preparation for moving its operations (which also included Military Police training) to Fort Leonard Wood, MO, especially while we were filling our canteens up to a dozen times each day after spending long hours clad in MOPP 4 gear in the near 100 degree heat of that particularly sweltering summer.

When you were off-post in the adjacent town of Anniston, you were unknowingly consuming a similarly toxic slurry, courtesy of Monsanto, who’d long used the town as a chemical dumping site. The cancer rates for Fort McClellan vets are alarmingly high, along with a long list of other ailments endured by the vets and birth defects suffered by their children.

Monsanto ultimately settled with the town of Anniston, though the settlement specifically excluded vets who'd served at Fort McClellan, who they figured had a bigger beef with Uncle Sam. Though a bill that would create a registry and attempt to alert those who were stationed at the post was proposed in 2013 (and refiled each year since), such efforts have floundered. The U.S. Army and federal government have obvious reasons for not wanting to open that Pandora’s box. I wondered whether that was the same attitude stifling the Bayshore grads.

Jozsa has no disillusions. She’s had everyone from school board members to police investigators, state legislators and state attorneys express shock at the data and profess a desire to get to the bottom of the story. Still, nothing has happened. She understands that, to some people, the only thing more frightening than the questions would be the answers.

By simply being the face of the families that have been affected, people have come to Cheryl regularly to add their names to the list. As a result, Jozsa has recorded no less than 192 cancer cases from those who attended the school. Sixty-three of those former students have died from the disease. In addition, she's also documented 34 cases of alumni with autoimmune disorders. She notes that this data has been accrued in the absence of any organized effort to contact those who attended or worked at the school.

Perhaps the most compelling part of Jozsa's story concerns the BHS Class of 1979. In a graduating class of 325, she knows of at least three Leukemia cases, including her own sister. In 1995, the first student from that class was diagnosed. Hers was the rare condition of chronic lymphocytic leukemia with leukemic meningitis.

Four years later, Cheryl's sister, Terri Lumsden Jewell, who also graduated in 1979, died of Myelogenic Leukemia, just after turning 38 years old. That same year (1999), the district would demolish the old Bayshore High School.

Stricken by grief in the wake of her sister's death, at first, a connection didn't dawn on Cheryl. But in 2003, another 1979 graduate, Bruce Bell, died of Acute Myelogenic Leukemia (which has an incidence of around 1.5 per 100,000). Cheryl says that it was Bruce's death that started her wondering if there was a connection between the rash of early-life cases of rare Leukemias and the old Bayshore High School.

At that point, Cheryl began educating herself on the disease, particularly to learn what some of the environmental causes of Leukemia were. One word kept coming up–Benzene. She'd never heard of that particular chemical but knew that since the old high school had been torn down, records of the demolition would be a good place to start looking at what might have been found on the property.

Jozsa's request for information in 2003 was met with a slow response by the Manatee School District. She said she had to invoke the state's open records law before anything got moving, and that it still took five months before she even began receiving records from the district.

It was in those first records that Jozsa uncovered a memo from August of 1995 by the district's former risk manager, Forrest Branscomb, which said, "According to recent dipstick readings it is believed that the tank at BHS is leaking."

Branscomb has since passed away, but is quoted in a later media article as saying, "We haven't been able to find anything in the records that would indicate a problem." The 1995 memo referred to a 10,000 gallon diesel storage tank that would be removed from the school's property in 1999, one of many on and adjacent to the property that the former school occupied.

In 2007, the group had a town hall meeting on the subject, which then Florida Rep. Bill Galvano attended. Galvano, now a state senator, said he was alarmed by the cluster of cases and later that year, site tests were performed on the property. The soil testing was only performed on the site where the tank had been removed, and they showed that all results were within acceptable limits.

However, Jozsa points out that a removal of such an enormous tank would require much fill dirt and thinks that the single site test did not go deep enough into the soil and likely captured mostly fill. She also wondered why more sites on the grounds weren’t tested. Ultimately, the 74-page report (click for PDF) seemed to provide more questions than answers.

Then there is the matter of the surrounding properties and their relation to the old Bayshore High School. There were at least six tanks in the the ground at the old vo-tech building next to the high school and six more that had been removed from the campus of what is now State College of Florida (formerly Manatee Community College and Manatee Junior College).

One of the vo-tech tanks, which was used to store spent motor oil, was not known to have been there previously. According to dispatch records, when it was removed, it was found to have had holes drilled in it. Groundwater nearby had been observed to have been contaminated with the oil. One of the MCC tanks was also found to be badly contaminated. Records also show that water lines had once connected between those properties and the old Bayshore High.

Jozsa and many other Bayshore graduates suspect that they were exposed to chemicals, most likely in the school's drinking water, during their time as students at BHS. They're not the only ones who have suspicions about the school. In the early '90s, employees at Bayshore High fought to have it investigated for "sick building syndrome" and later petitioned to have it torn down, rather than repurposed, once a new school was planned. They believed that a leaky roof, bad air conditioning and an abundance of carpet conspired to create a mold and mildew ridden environment that caused a plethora of health problems. The search for answers, however, has unfortunately led only to more questions.

The school was not hooked up to the county's municipal water supply until 1998. It is presumed that water for school fountains, sprinklers, showers, etc. was obtained from a well prior, though no record seems to exist to confirm this or any other source, which is also noted in the testing report.

A lack of documentation is a troubling theme to the Bayshore High story.

In late 2010, Cheryl started researching Manatee School Board meeting minutes, hoping to get more information on both the construction and demolition of the old school. She was alarmed to discover that while records from 1918 to 1960 had been scanned into the system, beginning in 1961, board minutes had been recreated, with someone hand-typing the supposed minutes in place of the scanned originals (click here to see an example). This is important, because that is exactly when the items related to the old Bayshore High School’s construction would have occurred. Indeed, mention of initial discussions are noted on the very last set of originals to have been scanned in.

Jozsa says she was told by then staff attorney Scott Martin in 2011 that he would find out why this had been done. However, by the time Martin was promoted to assistant superintendent, she hadn't received a response, despite a follow-up letter from attorney Michael Moore, of Orlando, who represented the BHS group at the time.

Moore next asked then Manatee School Board Attorney John Bowen the question. Bowen told Moore that the retyped records were owed to the originals being in poor condition. But Jozsa said that she found original minutes to be in "pristine condition" when she was allowed to inspect them at $30 per hour.

In addition, Jozsa says she was shocked to find that the microfiche for the years 1995-1999 was "missing." She was given no explanation as to why. This is significant, as it would have been the period immediately preceding, during and following the demolition of the old school. Jozsa said that there was also the lack of a "record disposition form" that would have had to have been completed for the missing records.

During that review, the person assigned to supervise her was actually one of the people who had their name on the properties of the documents that were "recreated". As she was leaving, Jozsa said she asked the employee why anyone would go to the trouble of retyping all of those meeting minutes? After repeating the question three times, Jozsa said she was finally told that it was owed to the date the district obtained a new and more functional scanner, though the entry dates suggest otherwise.

Frustrated by her inability to access information, she took her case directly to the school board in 2012. She then met with MCSD officials again and was promised she would get another chance to access the original records (which never happened). Jozsa says that former MCSD Superintendent Tim McGonegal said he would also see to it that the original school board minutes would be scanned in online, in place of the re-typed ones. McGonegal resigned in 2012, and that too, never happened.

There's also a troubling time gap between logging the minutes. According to record logs, 10 months passed between January 16, 2009 when the last scanned records were entered and the first re-typed records were entered on October 15 of that same year. Jozsa thinks that lag could have been accounted for by the need to "re-create" the minutes. Time logs also show that many of the entries were after normal working hours, leaving Jozsa to wonder whether it was some sort of special project.

With no relief from the school board and district officials, Jozsa looked to law enforcement. In 2014, she wrote to the Florida Inspector General with her concerns, which were turned over to the State Attorney’s Office for investigation. State Attorney Ed Brodsky’s office then asked the Bradenton Police Department to investigate the allegations in terms of whether there were criminal acts related to the stewardship of the school board minute records.

Later that year, Jozsa met with BPD investigators to discuss the recreated board minutes and how she thinks they tie into the BHS cancer cases. Bradenton Police Captain Josh Cramer told me this week that the case remains open and an investigation is ongoing, though he couldn’t comment on specifics.

No one questions that graduates and employees of the old Bayshore High School have experienced a suspicious degree of health maladies, particularly cancers, at an alarmingly high incident rate. The questions are how that came to be; who, if anyone is responsible; and what can be done to best support other current and potential victims.

Jozsa also points out that it seems unlikely that the methods of installing, drilling into, and improperly disposing of wells were specific to those schools in the district during that era. She notes that no effort has ever been made to do a mass mailer or otherwise contact alumni and employees of the old high school to alert them of the possible risks they face.

Just like the Fort McClellan case, no one seems eager to tell a large body of people that they might have been exposed to high levels of carcinogens or ask how many of them have suffered various health problems. The potential price of assuming health care costs, not to mention inviting litigation, is what the people who ponder such things like to call prohibitive. It goes without saying that the Manatee County School District is not looking for new ways to spend money, when they are having so much trouble finding the funds to meet basic operational needs.

Meanwhile, the people who know all too well what they are up against go to each annual medical exam with a little more anxiety, and are left to wonder whether each nagging ailment is perhaps something more. It's like hosting an internal time bomb without being able to see the display. For those at the helm, taking responsibility for the sins of the past seems to have little upshot when you already have more than enough challenges in the present, and more still lurking in the future. It would be easier if the victims would just go away–and sooner, rather than later. Unfortunately for their loved ones, too many of them are likely to do just that.

Dennis Maley is a featured columnist for The Bradenton Times. His column appears each Thursday and Sunday. Dennis' debut novel, A Long Road Home, was released in July, 2015. Click here to order your copy.