State probe wrongly blamed bee sting

July 13, 2000
By John Tuohy, USA TODAY

For Tony Behun's mother, death won't leave.

It has lingered in Brenda Robertson's head in various forms of guilt, doubt, shock, anger, surprise and skepticism for 5 1/2 years.

In that time, government and medical explanations of what killed Tony have changed four times. Robertson is beginning to doubt whether she will ever get a satisfactory answer.

"I am upset. It is frustrating, and all I am trying to do is get some answers," Robertson says. "I think there are people who don't want to admit they made a mistake."

Tony, I 1, died less than a week after riding a dirt motorbike through sludge on a hillside half a mile from his Osceola Mills, Pa., home on a Saturday in October 1994. The sludge plastered his clothes and skin.

"He was all covered in dirt and grime" when he got home, Robertson says. She immediately made Tony change his clothes while she hosed off his dirt bike.

Two days later Tony had a sore throat and headache. When a boil formed on his left arm, Tony was taken to a doctor, who said he had the flu and prescribed antibiotics.

But the next day Tony had trouble breathing and was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Pittsburgh. He was dead by Friday morning

Doctors said Tony died of a bacterial infection. They asked Robertson whether her son had eaten something bad or been bitten by an animal or played in poisonous plants.

"We couldn't think of any dangerous activity like that," Robertson says. "I sat around for months wondering what had happened. Did something happen that I should have spotted? Had I done something wrong? How could I have prevented it?"

The mystery lingered until March 1999. Then it got murkier.

Based on a rumor they heard about an 11-year-old boy who died near a sludge site, officials at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection conducted an investigation. Three months later the DEP reported its findings: The boy had died of a bee sting, not sludge. In fact, investigators said, sludge had not been applied to the hillside at the time the boy rode his bike there.

Robertson was shocked when she read the results of the investigation in the local newspaper. Obviously, the 11-year-old in question was her son, though the DEP never identified him, and she knew full well that he didn't die of a bee sting.

"It was a complete lie, and yet people walked up to me and said, 'We didn't know Tony died of a bee sting. Why didn't you ever tell us?"' Robertson says. "It made me look like an idiot."

The DEP did another probe after admitting the first one was flawed. It concluded that Tony didn't die of a bee sting. Instead, it determined that sludge had been applied to the field, but that his death was caused by exposure to a pathogen called Staphylococcus aureus, which "is not known to be found in biosolids."

But Martin discovered that the Environmental Protection Agency lists Staphylococcus aureus as a pathogen in sludge, along with 11 others, though the agency says it is of "minor concern. "

EPA scientist and whistle-blower David Lewis says he believes that the lime used to disinfect sludge could have opened a lesion on Tony's arm. The staph infection then could have crept into in his bloodstream through the abrasion. If the strain of staph had been an especially tough one, originating in hospital waste, for example, it could have been fatal, Lewis says.

DEP director Jarnes Scif sent Robertson a letter May 10 to apologize for the botched bee-sting investigation. In the letter he says, "Our investigation and the conclusions cannot offer you an explanation for the cause of your son's tragic death."