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...
Ron Bonds fell sick after he and wife Nancy Kratzer ate
Mexican for lunch. But nothing Bonds published was stranger than
the final chapter of his life.
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.
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.
"Is it hot enough?"
Nancy asked when their lunches arrived.
"Lukewarm," Ron said -- but he was too famished to send the
plate back.
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.
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."
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." A rare
statistic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"We’re having to do more with less," says Adewale Troutman,
director of the Fulton County Department of Health and Wellness.
Whether
more frequent or tougher inspections would have spared Bonds,
however, is an open question.
"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.
The suit, now in the deposition phase, does not specify damages.
Kratzer says she doesn’t care about the money. "I just want people
to know what can happen," she says. "And I want to see that dump
closed."
Conspiracy theories
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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. Toxic bacteria
could lodge in the sacs, too. 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.
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.
About 3 a.m., he asked her to call 911. 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.
"Your husband’s in bad shape," one of the EMTs told her as they loaded
him onto a stretcher and sped off to Grady.
It was the last time she saw
him alive.
Unraveling the mystery
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Please pass this message on, and please, for your safety: DON’T EAT
THERE!" she wrote.
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. 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.
The sight galls Kratzer.
"I drive by there," she says, "and I
think: You fools!"
Restaurant response
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.
Eisenstein declined to comment on the Bonds case.
"He
thinks he’s being inappropriately blamed," says his lawyer, Richard
Foster.
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.
"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?"
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. 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.
One of the items cited was improper temperature on the steam table.
The ’simple’ theory
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.
"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.
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.
She subscribes to the single-burrito theory.
"It’s
simple," she says. "Someone went out to eat and died. That’s not
supposed to happen."
