Federal authorities are investigating a new spate of incidents in which white powder has been mailed to schools and other locations locally and nationwide, with most bearing a Dallas postmark and return address.
“I can confirm that we are investigating, but I cannot say more because it is an ongoing investigation,” said Dallas FBI spokeswoman Beverly Esselbach. “So far, all of the packages that have been tested have been nonhazardous.”
Federal officials have been sporadically plagued with batches of such mailings in recent years, many from the Dallas area.
The perpetrator of the recent white powder scares is unknown. Envelopes bearing the substance have been sent to schools as far away as Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as to some in North Texas. In a few cases, schools have been evacuated or delayed. No one has been harmed.
On Monday, authorities were called to a DeSoto doctor’s office after a white substance was found there. The powder was later determined to be cornstarch, the same substance found in most of the other envelopes.
Last week, Sunset High School, along with three schools in Plano and Wylie, received suspicious envelopes on the same day, all containing cornstarch.
“We kind of went on lockdown at Sunset and it took all of about an hour to get it all figured out,” Dallas schools spokesman Jon Dahlander said Wednesday. “We turned it over to the FBI and the postmaster general.”
Federal officials believe the person who sent letters containing white powder to some U.S. embassies and governors’ offices in 2008 also sent 30 similar letters to houses of worship and businesses in Texas, Illinois and Massachusetts in 2010.
Last May, the FBI investigated the mailings of nearly three dozen letters containing a nontoxic white powder to schools in the Washington, D.C., area. The envelopes for those letters also bore a Dallas postmark.
Esselbach said that no arrests have been made and there are no suspects in the most recent mailings.
She said that every FBI field office where a suspicious envelope has been sent is handling its own investigation, “but we are all communicating with each other about it.”
Officials at schools in New England, where several of the envelopes arrived on the same day last week, said the packages caused little to no disturbance.
“We had about 450 students who never knew anything was going on,” Lisa Firth, assistant principal of Memorial Elementary in Milford, Mass. “We had lunch as usual. It was in such a place that we could close that hallway off and all the kids just thought someone threw up in the hallway and that’s why they had to stay in their classrooms.”
Debra Gately, principal of Dedham Middle School in Dedham, Mass., near Boston, said that after a secretary opened the envelope, Gately and two other school officials quietly went to each classroom to explain to teachers what was happening. The students were kept in the classroom.
“There was undoubtedly concern, but in terms of creating or feeling panic, I just wanted to make sure the people who were in the immediate vicinity of the office weren’t in any danger. And then it was making sure the students weren’t in any danger.”
At Village Elementary School in York, Maine, principal April Noble was prepared. On March 5, Maine authorities sent out a statewide bulletin warning of the envelopes. So when one arrived at Noble’s school Monday with a Dallas postmark, officials there never even opened it.
“I had read in the news about this so I wasn’t panicked,” she said. “I knew that in most cases it had turned up as a nonviolent substance, so I just knew to turn it over to the proper authorities for their protocol.”
Domestic terrorism expert Herman B. “Dutch” Leonard, a professor of public management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, said Noble acted correctly. But he also said that people still need to remain vigilant.
“There have been an awful lot of hoaxes … so people are appropriately aware that most of the things out there now are a fraud,” said Leonard, who also co-chairs the school’s program on crisis leadership. But anyone who treats any white powder as obviously not risky is making a mistake.”
Leonard said that he could only speculate about the reason the hoaxes have persisted now more than 10 years after five people died — including two Washington, D.C., postal employees — from deadly anthrax powder attacks. The person believed to be responsible for those assaults committed suicide in 2008 before any charges were filed.
“It’s probably like any other sort of hoax: People want to get attention, or want to irritate someone who they believe has wronged them in some way,” Leonard said. “But you’d like to track down whoever is doing this and figure out why they’re doing it and keep it from escalating.”
Gately agreed, adding that the mailings have left a bad impression of the Lone Star State.
“Whoever it is, they’re not giving a good name to Texas,” Gately said.