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	Photo by Travis Pratt Scenes from a memorial service that was held for Bruce Ivins on Saturday at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Frederick.

Aydinel, who volunteered with Ivins at the Frederick County chapter of the American Red Cross for more than five years, joined dozens of family, friends and colleagues Saturday morning at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Frederick for Ivins' memorial service.

The church was surrounded by about a dozen Frederick Police Department officers, whose presence the family and church requested to keep media from attending the private service, Lt. Clark Pennington said.

Shortly after his apparent suicide on July 29, Ivins was implicated as the sole suspect in an FBI investigation into the 2001 anthrax mailings, which killed five people and injured 17 others.

Aydinel said she didn't believe the accusations about him. The FBI itself should be under investigation for its handling of the case, she said.

Nevertheless, talk about the federal investigation was absent from the low-key ceremony.

Instead, Ivins' older brother gave an eloquent speech, filled with colorful anecdotes about growing up and vacationing together, Aydinel said. Two former colleagues who worked at Fort Detrick also spoke about how Ivins developed an anthrax vaccine.

Aydinel said a pianist played a piece that Ivins had written, which she described as beautiful.

"He was a talented musician, funny and entertaining," she said.

Though Shannon Moore knew Ivins from the time they spent in a St. Johns folk group together, she wasn't planning to attend Saturday's service, she wrote in an e-mail Friday.

"I think there may be a lot of tourists at the funeral and I would rather remember Bruce as I knew him apart from the horrible tragedy and consequences of his mental illness," she wrote.

While Moore was a high school student, Ivins encouraged her interest in science and allowed her to shadow him on the job. He also supported her writing a letter to the editor about women's rights.

"I have definitely been grieving with my family since I learned about his death last week," she wrote.

Russell Byrne, who attended Saturday's service, worked with Ivins in United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases' bacteriology division from about 1993 to 2000, and acted as his supervisor from 1998 to 2000.

During that time period, he said he didn't notice any erratic behavior from Ivins, nor did he receive complaints from others.

"If there had been problems with him getting along with people, I would have heard about it," Byrne said. "I can't imagine he had anything to do with the anthrax letters. I never seriously considered it, just from what I knew about him and how the place worked."

Though there were many people at the service who were closer to Ivins, Byrne said he was a friend and a fellow parishioner. He attended St. John's 11 a.m. services once or twice a month to hear Ivins play the keyboard.

"He knew a lot of people," Byrne said. "I was surprised. There was a lot to his life, a lot about him I didn't know."

Byrne said Ivins' memorial was reassuring. Readings from the Rev. Richard Murphy from the books of Job, Romans and Matthew were mostly about being at peace with others and the bonds people make that don't end in death.

"It was clear that he wasn't being abandoned by the people that knew him or his parish," Byrne said.