Training gets team ready for ricin

When a biochemist intent on suicide injected himself with the deadly poison ricin in 2003, Las Vegas authorities were unprepared and ill-equipped to handle it.

Police officers at the scene handled the liquid toxin and its main ingredient, castor beans, without any protective equipment as they packaged them to send to the hospital for testing. Some officers went home without any decontamination.

The victim, Tomoo Okada, was taken to Valley Hospital with the ricin, and the ambulance that took him dropped him off and went back to answering calls without being decontaminated.

But as authorities and health officials realized what they were dealing with, they scrambled to find everyone who had been exposed and contain the potentially deadly exposure to the poison.

The officers were rushed to University Medical Center for decontamination and observation.

The ricin was sent back to Okada's house, which was then locked down.

UMC and Valley both closed their emergency rooms.

"This was a nightmare of a call," said Las Vegas police Detective Rick Breeden, a member of the valley's task force that deals with weapons of mass destruction, including deadly agents such as ricin.

The task force, called All-Hazards Regional Multi-Agency Operations and Response, or ARMOR, includes Las Vegas, Henderson and North Las Vegas police, the Clark County and Las Vegas fire departments, and state and federal agencies.

The team is trained to handle a variety of dangers, including chemical, biological and nuclear threats.

The team was created in 2005, so it didn't exist during the 2003 ricin incident.

But five years later when a second ricin incident grabbed headlines in Las Vegas, the team responded and identified the poison within 23 minutes thanks to an array of sophisticated testing equipment.

The team's handling of that incident at an Extended Stay America hotel in February 2008 made it a model for future training courses.

A group from the Advanced Chemical and Biological Integrated Response Course at U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah was in Las Vegas on Monday to observe Breeden and fellow Detective Doug Huffmaster re-create that incident and talk about how they did it.

"We like what they're doing," said Wendell Williams, a program manager for the training course.

The ARMOR team took the course shortly before last year's incident and implemented what they learned. Williams said it's valuable to show how the training was applied in a real-world situation.

"The training they gave us worked," Huffmaster said.

Last year's incident began when hotel workers found guns and anarchist books tabbed at the ricin sections in the room of Roger Bergendorff, who had been hospitalized about a week earlier.

ARMOR team members searched the room and found no ricin.

But days later, Bergendorff's cousin, Thomas Tholen, left a plastic bag at the hotel front desk that contained powdered ricin and castor beans.

Police told the staffers to quarantine the yellow bag from Allstate Storage on Boulder Highway and sent the ARMOR team, which identified the ricin and helped lead the investigation that included 10 crimes scenes.

The team had all the sites, which include cars, hotel rooms and the police evidence vault, checked and deemed safe within 10 hours. That took three days in the 2003 incident.

Investigators later learned that Bergendorff made the ricin in his Reno apartment in 2005.

He pleaded guilty to federal charges and was sentenced to 42 months in prison. Tholen also pleaded guilty to federal charges in Utah and received two years' probation.

Contact reporter Brian Haynes at bhaynes@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0281.