Suspicious letter prompts evacuation at Harvard Law
Similar powder sent to newspaper
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Letters containing white powder sent to Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz and the Wall Street Journal tested negative for anthrax yesterday.
An assistant to the well-known lawyer opened a white envelope, which contained a card, at around 11 a.m. yesterday. She saw the powder and alerted authorities.
"My secretary was really brave and endured most of the trauma," Dershowitz, who wrote an opinion piece for the Journal defending Israel's actions in Gaza, said last night. "It was terrible. . . . It's a serious crime, even if turns out the powder was not contaminating."
The discovery of the envelopes at the newspaper and Harvard, which both bore postmarks from Knoxville, sent officials scurrying in three states and rekindled memories of the 2001 anthrax panic. In Massachusetts, authorities also responded to suspicious mail in Rockland, although it was not related.
As a precaution, the law school alerted the Harvard University Police Department, the university's environmental health and safety team, and the Cambridge police and fire departments. They cleared the fifth floor of Hauser Hall, where Dershowitz's office is located.
Although authorities said they did not believe that a full evacuation of the building was warranted, administrators canceled classes scheduled in the building yesterday and urged faculty and students to study and hold classes elsewhere for the time being. The building will reopen this morning.
"You have to take these things extremely seriously," said Robert London, spokesman for the law school. "Even with negative lab results, it's still a form of domestic terrorism."
Gail Marcinkiewicz, spokeswoman for the FBI in Boston, said, "We'll investigate all leads to determine who sent the letters and why."
Marcinkiewicz said six letters containing a suspicious substance were also sent to Rockland Town Hall, which was evacuated yesterday, but the letters bore different postmarks and did not contain white powder. She said the incident was not related to the letters sent to the Journal and Harvard.
The Journal reported that two floors of the newspaper's Lower Manhattan headquarters were evacuated as authorities investigate the matter. The suspicious mail - in more than a dozen identical, white envelopes - was addressed to several New York-based executives at the newspaper, which is published by
New York police officials said the envelopes might be linked to mail with white powder sent Dec. 2 to Fox News. That powder was declared harmless.
Globe correspondent Eric Schwartzel contributed to this report. Material from wire services was also used. Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com.
