Settlement reached in anthrax death

BOCA RATON, Fla., Nov. 30 (UPI) -- The wife of a Florida journalist who died from exposure to anthrax will get a $2.5 million settlement in her long-running lawsuit against U.S. government.

Maureen Stevens sued eight years ago, seeking to hold government officials responsible for the anthrax attacks that killed her husband, Bob Stevens, and four others, and caused serious illness for 17 other people.

"She's relieved," her attorney, Richard Schuler, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. "She still misses her husband. It's been 10 years. She still wears her wedding ring, and she wears his ring around her neck so it is closest to her heart."

Her wrongful-death lawsuit, which originally sought $50 million in damages, has been creeping toward a settlement for several months, the newspaper said. Papers filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach indicated the settlement was finalized Nov. 23, the newspaper reported.

Bob Stevens, 63, was a photo editor for tabloid publisher American Media Inc. in Boca Raton when he was exposed to the anthrax that was delivered by mail. He died Oct. 5, 2001, several days after being exposed. A co-worker also was exposed but survived after a lengthy illness.

The anthrax discovered at AMI signaled the beginning of the anthrax mail scare. More letters containing anthrax were mailed to New York television networks and a U.S. Senate office building.

Stevens and her attorneys contended a rogue government scientist -- or scientists -- was responsible for the anthrax attacks. After the July 2008 suicide of Bruce Ivins, an anthrax scientist at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., an FBI investigation named Ivins as the sole perpetrator of the biological attacks.