Pesticide chemical ruled cause of death for worker who fumigated Broward warehouse
Two pest-control employees died and another was hospitalized after fumigating a Pompano Beach furniture warehouse in April. A Broward medical examiner’s report released Friday ruled “acute toxic effects” of a chemical in the gas they used as the cause of death of one of the workers.
A chemical company that sold the pest-control company the gas told state investigators that over 100 gas canisters may have been mishandled, according to the report. The report does not say whether the mishandling could have caused the deaths or if the company is under investigation.
Leon Johnson, 64, was found dead in a truck outside of his Hollywood apartment the night of April 22, hours after he and two other employees of Anderson Pest Control had fumigated a Baer’s Furniture warehouse in the 1500 block of Southwest 12th Avenue in Pompano Beach, according to the report.
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A second employee from Boynton Beach died later that day, but the medical examiner’s report for his death has not yet been released. Cris Anderson, the owner of the company and the third employee involved in the fumigation, was hospitalized later that day.
“He was very cautious,” Demetra Smith, Johnson’s wife, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Saturday. “So what the report says, coming out, it’s kind of unbelievable.”
A neighbor had found Johnson sitting in his truck, unresponsive, with a sign in the back window that read “Danger Deadly Poison,” according to the medical examiner’s report. Hollywood Police responded and broke the truck window open. Soon after, Fire Rescue arrived and declared Johnson dead.
Hazmat teams tested the truck for chemicals. All the tests came back negative.
Investigators later found multiple other signs reading “Danger Deadly Poison.” They determined the poison referenced by the sign to be sulfuryl fluoride, a gas commonly used in fumigations, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The next day, investigators contacted Anderson, who told them he was in intensive care at the VA Medical Center in West Palm Beach. He was “somewhat confused” and “in and out of conversation” with “minor slurring,” investigators wrote.
Anderson told investigators that he knew about the deaths of Johnson and the other employee, referred to only as Jason in the report.
The three men had fumigated the large warehouse earlier in the day, he said, but were outside the whole time, running hoses from the outside to the inside with sulfuryl fluoride canisters attached.
After attaching the canisters and turning them on, the men returned to the truck parked outside of the warehouse, where they began to feel sick, Anderson said. He attributed it to exhaustion and dehydration.
All three men had been working for 32 to 36 hours before the fumigation, he said, and had begun the fumigation at 3 a.m.
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Six hours later, around 9:30 a.m. that morning, Jason began vomiting and Anderson told him to go home, the report states. An hour later, Johnson started vomiting and Anderson told him to lie down in the truck. Johnson slept for a few hours, then woke up and, still feeling a little sick, returned to work.
They finished the fumigation around 2 or 3 p.m., Anderson told investigators. Around this time, Anderson also began to feel sick. Johnson took Anderson’s truck home, while Anderson said he would have someone pick him up. Soon after Anderson returned home, he was hospitalized, the report states.
His family members told investigators that he had been working with pesticides his whole life and had never had an incident before.
Pest control was “something he did for over 40 years, so he was very cautious with what he did,” Smith said. “That was his career job that he loved.”
An investigator with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services called the medical examiner investigators and told them that the chemical company that sold Anderson Pest Control the gas “had returned over 100 canisters back to them with the valves still open, and wanting to report the possibility of mishandling of the canisters,” the report states.
The report does not name the chemical company.
On April 25, Pompano Beach Fire Rescue and Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies evacuated the Baer’s Furniture warehouse out of an “abundance of caution,” spokesman Carey Codd said. The building was cleared about an hour later and employees returned to work.
The same day, investigators tested Johnson’s clothing, which tested positive for hydrogen fluoride. A toxicology examination found fluoride in his bodily fluids, according to the autopsy report. The report ruled the cause of Johnson’s death to be “acute toxic affects of fluoride” and an accident.
It remains unclear how Johnson was exposed to the gas.
The investigation into the Boynton Beach worker’s death is ongoing, Boynton Beach Police Department spokeswoman Holly Picciano said Saturday. She declined to provide further details beyond what was in Johnson’s medical examiner’s report.
