The start of the story is this: In December 2008, a 23-year-old research assistant named Sheri Sangji accidentally set herselfon fire while working in a chemistry laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. She died 18 days later in a hospital burn unit.
Last week, nearly four years later, the University of California agreed to a settlement to avert felony negligence charges in Sangji's death. The chemistry professor responsible for the laboratory, Patrick Harran, still stands accused of willfully violating occupational health and safety standards; it is actually the first time that a professor in the United States has been charged with a felony related to the death of a worker.
If found guilty, Harran faces the possibility of another precedent: up to four years jail time. But Harran's lawyers say that the damning report from California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health, the one on which felony charges were based, can't be trusted. Why? Because they've -- somewhat improbably -- dug into the past of the report's author and, they claim, discovered that he was a teenage murderer.
Cal/OSHA has responded angrily ("The defendants' most recent attempt to deflect attention from the charges simply does not relate in anyway to the circumstances of Ms. Sangji's death or the actual evidence..."). The investigator, Brian Baudendistel, has denied the story. Still enough questions have been raised that the judge has postponed a decision on the charges against Harran until early September.
Harran's colleagues believe this damaging revelation could be a very successful move by his attorneys. According to a story in Nature News, one prediction is that the UCLA chemist could "walk away" with reduced or dropped charges. Harran -- a talented and respected researcher -- has support in the chemistry community; some scientists have suggested that UCLA has protected itself at Harran's expense.
But in this case, I'd still rather that Harran "walked away" -- if that's the term we really want to use here -- because he could prove that he'd done everything possible to protect the safety of students working under his supervision. I'd rather the defense taught us to admire the integrity of chemistry professors more than their willingness to engage in combative legal maneuvers. I'd rather we didn't see any more harm done to the living.
But let's not count on that. We're not at the end of the story yet. And anyone with personal experience will tell you this: A violent death is like a stone hurled into a pond. And the resulting shock wave spreads collateral damage far beyond the point of impact and far longer than anyone understands in that moment when the rock hits the water.
The accident that started this all occurred on December 29, 2008.
Sangji had received an undergraduate chemistry degree from Pomona College but had decided to become a lawyer. She was thinking, perhaps, of becoming an environmental lawyer. She took the UCLA job while waiting to hear back from law schools regarding her applications. The letter of acceptance from her first choice school, UC Berkeley, arrived shortly after her death.
Harran had only recently come to UCLA from Texas, where he had gained renown for his work in synthetic chemistry, such as lab-created toxins that might be used to treat cancer. You might imagine that this kind of work involves some very dangerous materials. I've written before, in a more light-hearted way, about the wonderfully explosive nature of chemistry, the kinds of fiery explosions that teachers sometimes generate to dazzle their students.
But no one jokes about the compound that Sangji was working with on that quiet December day. It belongs to a class of materials called pyrophoric, which means that they ignite when exposed to air. One of the best chemistry bloggers I know, Chemjobber, later wrote a post on the subject called "If I were working with tert-butyllithium..." detailing its dangers and how to guard against them. (As an aside, if you really want to follow this story in much better, nuanced detail, you can't go wrong here with Chemjobber or the terrific reporting byChemical & Engineering News).
Sangji was transferring a liquid measure of the tert-butyllithium with a syringe -- a method that other chemists warn can be considered less than ideal with a material this hazardous -- when the device came apart in her hands. She had done this successfully once before under Harran's supervision. But this second time, the compound exploded into impossibly fierce flame.
The blaze set her rubber gloves on fire. And they were her primary protection. She had not been instructed to always wear a shielding lab coat or provided with flame-retardant gear. She was wearing exactly the wrong thing -- a synthetic yarn sweater. It melted. Neither she nor the other students in the lab had been trained to rush for an emergency shower. Sangji ran screaming around the room; one student tried to smother the flames with a lab coat; another splashed water from a sink.
When she went to the hospital, she had second- and third-degree burns seared across more than 40 percent of her body. What does that mean? Those of us who suffer from the occasional grease splatter or oven rack singe are lucky not to know. But here's what her sister, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, told California Watch: "Her hands had been burned all the way down to tendon. Her abdominal wall had been burned off."
She died. Does anyone wonder that Naveen Sangji and the rest of her family wanted apologies, accountability and -- let's face it -- something you rarely see in our era of legal wariness: admission of culpability. "Sheri wasn't out doing something stupid," Naveen said to the Los Angeles Times shortly after the accident. "She was working at a lab at one of the largest universities in the world."
As they would discover, two months before the accident, UCLA's own safety inspectors had cited the lab for more than a dozen safety violations, including the failure to enforce wearing of protective gear and poor storage of dangerous chemicals. UCLA records indicated that little had been done to correct the problems. After Sangji's death, the state fined the university more than $31,000 for safety violations in Harran's laboratory.
A follow up investigation by Cal/OSHA was even more scathing. Investigative journalists at California Watch obtained a transcript of Cal/OSHA's interview with Harran, which I'll quote from briefly here:
Investigator:* When Sheri arrived, do you know if she received any general lab safety training from the university?*
Harran: I don't believe she received generalized safety training, no.
I__nvestigator__: Did you ever discuss the characteristics of t-butyllithium with Sheri?
Harran: No, not of t-butyllithium specifically, no.
Harran from the beginning expressed shock and grief over the death. He described Sangji's death as a tragic accident, which, of course, it was. He and the university also described her as an "experienced chemist" which, of course, she wasn't. I teach graduate students in journalism, most of them also in their early 20s, at the University of Wisconsin. They are talented, capable, and, often, I think, much smarter than I am. When they are experienced journalists, when they've had, say, a decade of practice, they'll be better than me. But at age 23, they're still figuring it out.
Should a chemist-in-training approach hazardous chemicals with extreme caution? Yes. Should she expect her employer to provide her with the necessary information and equipment to engage in such caution? Most of us would argue yes. Should chemistry professors be held to the standard of employee safety as, say, chemical manufacturers or other industries? The most important "yes" to that question comes from Cal/OSHA senior investigator Brian Baudendistel.
Baudendistel concluded that the laboratory operation was careless enough for long enough to justify felony charges of willful negligence. The Sangji family, angered by those suggestions that Sheri's experience should have taught her better, pushed for prosecution. Late last year the Los Angeles District Attorney's office officially brought charges against Harran, UCLA, and the University of California system itself.
On Friday, UCLA and the University of California Board of Regents accepted a settlement in exchange for dropping charges against the institution. The agreement required the university to acknowledge responsibility in Sangji's death, to set up and enforce much stronger safety procedures in laboratories across the system and to establish a $500,000 environmental law scholarship in Sheri Sangji's name.
And if the story stopped here, we might say that it ended on a positive and protective note.
But the charges against Harran stand separately, and so we haven't reached the end.
His lawyers have responded to the Baudendistel report in part by focusing on Baudendistel himself. They claim to have found evidence that in 1985 he and two friends conspired to set up the murder of a drug dealer. All three boys were convicted and although, since they were juveniles, the records were sealed, attorneys were able to identify the killers through press coverage at the time. Although Baudendistel has insisted that Harran's defense team tracked down the wrong man, they say they have a fingerprint match to prove it. They say further that a man who covers up his past history is not credible -- and therefore neither is is report on the UCLA laboratory.
The* Los Angeles Times* described it as a "bizarre turn" in the story. "What does it say about Professor Harran's defense team that they're playing this card at this relatively late time? I speculate that plea negotiations may be going poorly and this is a long shot, but I dunno," wrote Chemjobber. Frankly, I was more sympathetic to Harran before this ploy. I do think he shares in the responsibility for Sangji's death, but I thought he'd been punished in numerous ways already.
But I'm not an admirer of a strategy in which one protects one's own reputation by destroying someone else's. And don't doubt that this legal maneuver will do real harm; already Baudendistel has resigned from a public safety board in response.
I understand that and I resent it. I actually believe (yes, call me an old-time liberal) that even if Baudendistel was the teenage murderer described in the defense documents, that person clearly did time, paid dues, and worked to build a life in which he tried to protect others. The Sangji investigation has nothing to do with a 27-year-old crime. And everything to do with accepting responsibility for one's actions.
But, of course, if everyone believed that, this would be a very different story. With a much better ending.
Images : 1) Chemistry laboratory/Wikimedia Commons 2) CaliforniaWatch.org 3) UCLA
