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	Staff file photo by Sam Yu In this September 2003 file photo, Bruce Ivins is seen at the American Red Cross Emergency Shelter in the Frederick Community College gym.

Sheppard Pratt is a psychiatric hospital in Baltimore County.

The News-Post has learned that Ivins was scheduled to appear in Frederick County District Court on Thursday after a peace order was taken out against him.

The woman who filed a peace order against him, Jean C. Duley, had been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury today, according to court documents.

“FBI involved, currently under investigation and will be charged with five capital murders,” she stated in court documents.

Calls to Duley’s attorney were not immediately returned. The document goes on to state that Ivins had made “homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats and actions towards therapist” and has a history of threats dating back to his graduate days.

“Dr. David Irwin, his psychiatrist, called him homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions,” the document states. “Will testify with other details.”

A temporary peace order hearing was held July 24 which ordered Ivins to not abuse or contact Duley or go to her home or job. Her home address and employment were kept confidential in the filing.

About 1:15 a.m. Sunday, Emergency Communications received a medical emergency call from Ivins’ Military Road home, said Lt. Shawn Martyak of the Frederick Police Department. Officials found Ivins unresponsive on the floor in a room in his home.

At the time when officers were called to the home, there was nothing to indicate it was a suicide, he said.

The department was notified Tuesday afternoon that Ivins had died by Frederick Memorial Hospital officials, Martyak said. They are conducting a death investigation which is the standard department procedure regarding suicides.

A final report from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is not expected for several weeks, he said.

Federal prosecutors investigating the 2001 anthrax attacks were planning to indict and seek the death penalty against Ivins in connection with anthrax mailings that killed five people. The scientist, who was developing a vaccine against the deadly toxin, committed suicide this week.

For more than a decade, he worked to develop an anthrax vaccine that was effective even in cases where different strains of anthrax were mixed, which made vaccines ineffective, according to federal documents reviewed by the AP.

In an e-mail statement to The Frederick News-Post, USAMRIID spokeswoman Caree Vander Linden wrote that the institute is mourning the loss of Ivins, who served there for 35 years as a civilian microbiologist. She had no further statement regarding the anthrax investigation other than to note that the investigation is ongoing.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine. A woman who answered the phone at Bruce Ivins’ home in Frederick declined to comment.

Through their spokeswomen, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-6th District, and Democratic Sen. Benjamin Cardin said they had not discussed this matter with either the FBI or Fort Detrick officials. In an e-mail to The News-Post, Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski's spokeswoman, Melissa Schwartz, declined to comment.

Ruth Ann Randall, a member of the family who owns The Frederick News-Post, knew Ivins.

"Several years ago I played in an Irish band with him," she said. "I remember mentioning at that time to the newsroom that he might be a good source on some of the anthrax stuff. Wow. Now look what happened! I'm in shock. He was a pretty religious guy, and he never seemed nervous around me (knowing I was with the paper) back when we played together and the subject of anthrax and Fort Detrick would come up."

Only last month, the government exonerated another scientist at the Fort Detrick lab, Steven Hatfill, whose name for years had been associated with the post-9/11 attacks that traumatized the nation. Investigators had publicly named Hatfill a “person of interest” in 2002. The government paid Hatfill $5.82 million to settle a lawsuit contending he was falsely accused and had been made a scapegoat for the crimes.

Hatfill's lawyer, reached this morning by The News-Post, said, "The FBI wants to speak to the victims' families first, and I want to respect that process. Today is not the appropriate time to comment. I want to give these families time to have comfort."

Investigators have been interviewing Ivins’ family and co-workers since at least last year, and the pressure increased after Hatfill’s name was cleared. Justice Department officials declined to comment. “We are not at this time making any official statements or comments regarding this situation,” said Debbie Weierman, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington field office, which is investigating the anthrax attacks, said Friday.

Tom Ivins, a brother of the scientist, told The Associated Press that his other brother, Charles, had told him that Bruce committed suicide and Tylenol might have been involved.

Tom Ivins said today that federal officials working on the anthrax case questioned him about his brother a year and a half ago.

“They said they were investigating him,” he said from Ohio, where he lives, in a CNN interview.

But he never talked to his brother about it: “I stay away from him,” Tom Ivins said.

A woman who answered the phone at the home of the third brother, Charles Ivins, in Etowah, N.C., refused to wake him and declined to comment on his brother’s death. “This is a grieving time,” she said.

Henry S. Heine, a scientist who had worked with Ivins on inhalation anthrax research at Fort Detrick, said he and others on their team have testified before a federal grand jury in Washington that has been investigating the anthrax mailings for more than a year. He declined to comment on Ivins’ death.

The Fort Detrick laboratory and its specialized scientists for years have been at the center of the FBI’s investigation of the anthrax mailings, which killed five people, shut down a Senate office building and postal center for months, and compounded Americans’ sense of vulnerability to terrorism.

An aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who received one of the anthrax-tainted letters, said Friday that Leahy had not yet been briefed on the developments. Leahy, as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, has the FBI under congressional oversight.

Unusual behavior by Ivins was noted at Fort Detrick in the six months following the anthrax mailings, when he conducted unauthorized testing for anthrax spores outside containment areas at the infectious disease research unit where he worked, according to an internal report. But the focus long stayed on Hatfill.

Dr. W. Russell Byrne, a physician who worked with Ivins in the bacteriology division of the Fort Detrick research facility for 15 years, said he does not believe Ivins was behind the anthrax attacks. Byrne of Frederick said he believes that Ivins was “hounded” by aggressive FBI agents who raided his home twice. He said Ivins was forcefully removed from his job by local police recently because of fears that he had become a danger to himself or others. The investigation led to Ivins being hospitalized for depression earlier this month, Byrne said.

He described Ivins as “eccentric,” but not dangerous.

“If he was about to be charged, no one who knew him well was aware of that, and I don’t believe it,” said Byrne, who attended the same Catholic church as Ivins, who played the keyboards and led the church’s musical program.

Norman Covert, a retired Fort Detrick spokesman who served with Ivins on an animal-care and protocol committee, said Ivins was “a very intent guy” at their meetings.

Ivins was the co-author of numerous anthrax studies, including one on a treatment for inhalation anthrax published in the July 7 issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

The Times said federal investigators moved away from Hatfill and concluded Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert Mueller changed leadership of the investigation in 2006. The new investigators instructed agents to re-examine leads and reconsider potential suspects. In the meantime, investigators made progress in analyzing anthrax powder recovered from letters addressed to two Leahy and Sen. Thomas Daschle, D-S.D., according to the report.

Besides the five deaths, 17 people were sickened by anthrax that was mailed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florida. The victims included postal workers and others who came into contact with the anthrax.

In the six months following the anthrax mailings, Ivins conducted unauthorized testing for anthrax spores outside containment areas at USAMRIID — the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick — and found some, according to an internal report by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, which oversees the lab.

In December 2001, after conducting tests triggered by a technician’s fears that she had been exposed, Ivins found evidence of anthrax and decontaminated the woman’s desk, computer, keypad and monitor, but didn’t notify his superiors, according to the report.

The report says Ivins performed more unauthorized sampling on April 15, 2002, and found anthrax spores in his office, in a passbox used for moving materials in and out of labs, and in a room where male workers changed from civilian clothing into laboratory garb.

Ivins told Army investigators he conducted unauthorized tests because he was worried that the powdered anthrax in letters that had been sent to USAMRIID for analysis might not have been adequately contained.

In January 2002, the FBI doubled the reward for helping solve the case to $2.5 million, and by June officials said the agency was scrutinizing 20 to 30 scientists who might have had the knowledge and opportunity to send the anthrax letters.

After the government’s settlement with Hatfill was announced in late June, Ivins started showing signs of strain, the Times said.

Ivins was one of the nation’s leading biodefense researchers.

In 2003, Ivins and two of his colleagues at the USAMRIID received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine. In 1997, U.S. military personnel began receiving the vaccine to protect against a possible biological attack. Within months, a number of vaccine lots failed a potency test required by federal regulators, causing a shortage of vaccine and eventually halting the immunization program. The USAMRIID team’s work led to the reapproval of the vaccine for human use.

The Times said Ivins was the son of a Princeton-educated pharmacist who was born and raised in Lebanon, Ohio. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in microbiology, from the University of Cincinnati.

He and his wife, Diane, owned a small white home just outside the main gate to Fort Detrick, about two blocks from an apartment where Hatfill once lived.

The Associated Press contributed to this report