- Ron Bonds sold conspiracies. The Atlantan published books
on unsolved mysteries and unexplained phenomena, from the Kennedy assassination
to the ominous black helicopters of the New World Order. In the subculture
of the paranormal, his reputation was such that writers for "The X-Files"
used to call him for ideas...
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- Ron Bonds fell sick after he and wife Nancy Kratzer ate
Mexican for lunch.
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- But nothing Bonds published was stranger than the final
chapter of his life.
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- On a beautiful spring Saturday last year, Bonds and his
wife, Nancy Kratzer, rose before dawn to work on the house they had just
bought in the Morningside neighborhood of Atlanta. Late that morning, they
broke for lunch and headed to a nearby Mexican restaurant, El Azteca on
Ponce de Leon.
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- Bonds ordered a No. 7 combo -- beef burrito, enchilada,
beans and rice. He asked the server to make sure the food was hot. It hadn't
been the last time he ate there.
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- "Is it hot enough?" Nancy asked when their
lunches arrived.
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- "Lukewarm," Ron said -- but he was too famished
to send the plate back.
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- Fifteen hours later, after an agonizing evening of vomiting
and diarrhea, Bonds was taken by ambulance from their home to Grady Memorial
Hospital. As Kratzer waited among the families of trauma victims, she thought
to herself: When this is over, I'm going to yell at Ron for putting me
through this.
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- Not long before sunrise, she was shown into a private
room. Doctors burst in. One of them broke the news: "Your husband
didn't make it."
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- Kratzer glared at him in disbelief. "I don't think
you have the right person," she said. "All we did was go out
to eat."
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- A rare statistic
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- Around 5:30 on the morning of April 8, 2001, Ronald W.
Bonds, a 48-year-old Atlanta native whose black goatee was beginning to
show flecks of gray, who liked to play guitar and argue politics over a
beer and take long walks with his wife, became a statistic.
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- Every year in the United States, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention estimates, more than 5,000 people die of food-borne
illness -- about 40 percent from something they ordered at a restaurant.
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- In Bonds' case, suspicion quickly fell on his last meal.
The Fulton County medical examiner determined he died of internal bleeding
caused by toxic bacteria in contaminated ground beef. He ruled the death
accidental and listed the scene of the accident as 939 Ponce de Leon Ave:
El Azteca.
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- If the finding is correct -- and the restaurant strongly
disputes it -- Bonds became the first person in decades to die of food
poisoning from a metro Atlanta restaurant. County and state health authorities
cannot remember the last local dining fatality.
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- "I've been here 29 years, and I've never heard of
another death like that one," says Ferrell Curlee, who oversees restaurant
inspections for the Gwinnett County Board of Health.
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- The death of Ron Bonds illuminates an area of government
regulation many people take for granted. The public rarely thinks about
restaurant inspections unless an outbreak of food poisoning hits the news,
as it did a decade ago when four children died from E. coli-tainted hamburgers
at Jack in the Box restaurants.
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- Georgia law requires county health departments to inspect
restaurants at least twice a year. But the task has become increasingly
difficult as eateries have mushroomed with the population, making restaurant
safety another area, like traffic or air quality, where growth has authorities
scrambling to keep up.
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- In the past five years, the number of permitted food
service establishments in metro Atlanta -- from restaurants to school cafeterias
to sandwich carts -- has increased by more than 50 percent. Yet the number
of full-time inspectors has changed little and has declined in one county,
Fulton, home of 15 percent of the state's restaurants. Budget cuts have
reduced the county's inspection force from 35 to 23.
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- "We're having to do more with less," says Adewale
Troutman, director of the Fulton County Department of Health and Wellness.
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- Whether more frequent or tougher inspections would have
spared Bonds, however, is an open question.
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- "We still don't know what happened in that kitchen,"
says attorney Mark Harper, who represents Kratzer in a wrongful death lawsuit
against El Azteca.
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- The suit, now in the deposition phase, does not specify
damages. Kratzer says she doesn't care about the money.
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- "I just want people to know what can happen,"
she says. "And I want to see that dump closed."
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- Conspiracy theories
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- It has been more than a year since her husband died,
but his presence still inhabits the cream-colored bungalow they shared
in Morningside. His guitar rests in a stand in the living room. His Fabulous
Fifties Bakelite radio decorates the mantel. His Mission-style easy chair
faces the big-screen TV, as if he had just stepped out.
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- "It was months before I could bring myself to sit
in it," says the 47-year-old widow, a slender Michigan native whose
nervous manner suggests the emotional turmoil within. She's still struggling
with an ulcer.
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- They met in the mid-'80s when both were working at the
Turtle's record store chain. Bonds was a character, an opinionated ironist
who wanted to be a music promoter and had started his own record label,
EOD ("Elvis on Drugs"), and his own mock faith, the Church of
Beaver Cleaver.
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- Bonds had always been fascinated by conspiracies and
mysteries. Shortly after the couple married in 1990, he announced he was
getting into the publishing business. He didn't have to look far for an
author: Kerry Thornley, a down-and-out veteran who was washing dishes at
a Mexican joint in Little Five Points. Thornley had served in the Marines
with Lee Harvey Oswald, and his novel based on the experience, "The
Idle Warriors," became the first product of Bonds' company, IllumiNet
Press.
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- The press issued three or four books a year, Bonds handling
the manuscripts while Kratzer did the typesetting and accounts. One title,
a UFO thriller called "The Mothman Prophecies," became a movie
starring Richard Gere. Their best seller, at 40,000 copies, was "Black
Helicopters Over America," a diatribe against the New World Order
that Bonds cooked up with author Jim Keith.
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- "They laughed all the way to the bank with that
one," Kratzer says. "Ron didn't really believe all that stuff.
But there were people who did, and he just fed their craziness."
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- In his final spring, Bonds had every reason to feel good
about himself. The publishing business was perking along, and the couple
had just bought a second house intown as an investment. What's more, he
had gone on a low-carb diet and shed 30 pounds.
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- Bonds did have a health problem, though. He suffered
from diverticulosis, a common condition in which the intestines are scarred
by small saclike growths. He avoided nuts, strawberries and other foods
that could lodge in the sacs and untrack his digestion.
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- Toxic bacteria could lodge in the sacs, too.
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- After lunch that Saturday, the couple ran some errands
and returned home for the evening. Ron settled in with his shortwave radio
while Nancy curled up with a TV movie. She says he ate nothing else except
some carrot cake.
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- Around 9 p.m., Ron told her he was feeling sick and disappeared
into a bathroom. Nancy checked on him from time to time, thinking he had
a stomach virus, then drifted off to sleep. She woke before midnight with
cramps of her own and retreated to the other bathroom. She didn't know
Ron had gotten worse and was vomiting repeatedly.
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- About 3 a.m., he asked her to call 911.
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- By the time the ambulance arrived, Ron was sprawled on
the dining room floor, dehydrated and complaining of muscle seizures in
his legs. The paramedics helped him back into a bathroom. After a while,
Nancy called out to see how he was doing. No answer. She cracked the door
and saw Ron mumbling to himself, his eyes rolled back.
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- "Your husband's in bad shape," one of the EMTs
told her as they loaded him onto a stretcher and sped off to Grady.
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- It was the last time she saw him alive.
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- Unraveling the mystery
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- Kratzer suspected food poisoning all along, but she received
no confirmation until the death certificate arrived more than a month after
her husband's body was cremated.
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- During an autopsy, the medical examiner found copious
amounts of blood in the bowels, so he sent a stool sample to the Georgia
Public Health Laboratory in Decatur. The lab discovered high levels of
Clostridium perfringens Type A, a bacterium often seen in small quantities
in beef and poultry. When it occurs in larger quantities -- anything above
100,000 organisms per gram is considered unsafe -- it can release toxins
that cause diarrhea, vomiting and, rarely, hemorrhaging. The bacterium
figures in 250,000 cases of food poisoning a year, the CDC estimates, only
seven of which result in death.
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- "It's not one of the common forms of food poisoning,"
says Paul Mead, an epidemiologist with the CDC's Foodborne and Diarrheal
Diseases Branch.
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- Four days after Bonds ate there, epidemiologists visited
El Azteca to collect samples of ground beef from the steam table. When
C. perfringens becomes dangerous, it usually has to do with cooked meat
being held at too low a temperature. The lab found 6 million organisms
per gram -- 60 times the safety threshold.
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- A microbiologist at the lab also ran genetic fingerprinting
tests to compare the bacteria from the food with cultures from Bonds' and
Kratzer's stool samples. The DNA strands were found to be almost identical,
suggesting the bacteria came from the same source.
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- In the meantime, the health department asked El Azteca
for credit card receipts covering the days when Bonds had eaten there and
when the food samples had been taken. Of the 35 customers reached by phone,
seven reported gastrointestinal problems.
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- On April 18, the department placed El Azteca on probation
for six months, meaning it had to meet stricter health standards during
frequent, unannounced inspections. The probation was eventually lifted.
Despite the death, the restaurant was never forced to close.
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- That infuriated Kratzer. Last summer, she fired off an
e-mail to colleagues at Emory University, where she works as an administrator
in the business school, warning them about El Azteca.
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- "Please pass this message on, and please, for your
safety: DON'T EAT THERE!" she wrote.
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- The e-mail ricocheted around Atlanta for weeks. Kratzer
eventually received more than 300 replies from people who wanted to express
sympathy or share their own gut-wrenching dining experiences.
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- As word spread, the restaurant's business plummeted.
But it gradually recovered, and by this spring, the patio out front was
again teeming with margarita sippers.
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- The sight galls Kratzer. "I drive by there,"
she says, "and I think: You fools!"
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- Restaurant response
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- In a way, El Azteca is a classic American success story.
A family of Mexican immigrants opened the first restaurant two decades
ago in Sandy Springs and expanded into a chain of more than a dozen outlets.
In 1996, they sold the location on Ponce to Bernie Eisenstein, an Atlanta
restaurant broker. He still owns the store -- which is not affiliated with
the others -- and can usually be found there before lunch conducting business
from a front table as oven-mitted waiters dash to and fro.
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- Eisenstein declined to comment on the Bonds case. "He
thinks he's being inappropriately blamed," says his lawyer, Richard
Foster.
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- The attorney is mounting a vigorous defense. In depositions,
Foster has raised questions about whether the food samples were handled
incorrectly, allowing bacteria to fester en route from the restaurant to
the lab. He also points out that Kratzer admits she and her husband ate
ground beef at home on the Thursday or Friday night before they visited
El Azteca.
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- "There's no question that Ron Bonds died because
he had diverticulosis and ingested this bacteria," Foster says. "The
question is: Where did it come from?"
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- The restaurant's health record has been scrutinized in
the early rounds of the lawsuit. Inspectors testified they received previous
complaints of sickness from meals at El Azteca, they found evidence of
rat infestation, and one caller reported finding a roach in a burrito.
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- Over the past three years, health officers have scored
the restaurant in the 80s and 90s (out of 100) with two exceptions: A 65
in October 1999 and a 69 in February 2001.
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- One of the items cited was improper temperature on the
steam table.
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- The 'simple' theory
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- After Bonds died, some of his friends in the conspiracy
underground were suspicious. One of his authors, Kenn Thomas, editor of
a Web site called the Steamshovel Press ("All conspiracy. No theory."),
went so far as to suggest in a book that the Atlantan's demise was part
of a plot against another writer, Jim Keith, who was investigating the
Princess Diana "assassination" when he died under odd circumstances
three years ago. Keith injured his knee falling off a stage at the Burning
Man arts festival in Nevada and suffered a fatal blood clot during surgery.
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- "I don't have all the dots connected, but my suggestion
is that someone wanted to silence Keith -- and Ron was Keith's publisher,"
Thomas maintains.
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- Hearing this scenario, Kratzer rolls her eyes. While
her husband would have appreciated such a flight of imagination -- indeed,
he might have published it -- she doesn't need international conspiracies
to understand his death.
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- She subscribes to the single-burrito theory.
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- "It's simple," she says. "Someone went
out to eat and died. That's not supposed to happen."
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- http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/metro/0602/09bonds.html
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