(forwarding from a post in alt.obituaries)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed
suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges
against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks
following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published
report.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the
government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been told about
the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported for Friday
editions. The laboratory has been at the center of the FBI's investigation
of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick (Maryland) Memorial Hospital. The Times,
quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive
dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

Tom Ivins, a brother of the scientist, told The Associated Press that
another of his brothers, Charles, told him Bruce had committed suicide.

A woman who answered the phone at Charles Ivins' home in Etowah, North
Carolina, refused to wake him and declined to comment on his death. "This is
a grieving time," she said.

A woman who answered the phone at Bruce Ivins' home in Frederick declined to
comment.

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr and FBI Assistant Director John
Miller declined to comment on the report.

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.

Heine declined to comment on Ivins' death.

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.