On Oct. 12, 2001, a Linton Hall employee called MSU police to report a burning feeling in her throat after opening a letter.

The East Lansing Fire Department rushed to Linton Hall to decontaminate 15 women for what they thought could be the deadly anthrax bacteria.

But no anthrax was found, and the women who were treated say the envelope did not even contain any white powder, a fact misinterpreted by a dispatcher. They also say they feel the emergency personnel violated their personal rights during the searches, causing emotional distress even one year after the incident.

“Just recently, I started being able to talk about it,” said 2002 graduate Danielle Winkler, who was a student employee in Linton Hall last year. “It’s humiliating - why would police officers do that to us, and why wouldn’t the administration stop them?”

MSU spokesman Terry Denbow said the first responsibility of the emergency personnel and the university is to ensure the women’s well-being.

“The responders to that situation clearly had the health and safety of those individuals as their goal,” he said. “I’m not going to talk about anything beyond that because I’m not an expert, but public relations aren’t going to be our primary goal.”

However, he said that “this does not discount our appreciation of and for the people in Linton Hall that day.”

But the women said they feel the emergency personnel reacted in the wrong manner. These women joined the Lansing branch of the American Civil Liberties Union to address these concerns at a meeting outside Linton Hall on Friday.

Lansing’s ACLU president, Henry Silverman, said his main concern is the fact that the decontamination procedures violated the women’s Fourth Amendment rights, which includes their rights to be secure and avoid unreasonable searches and seizures.

“Even if there did exist a danger, they had a constitutional right to refuse,” Silverman said.

But Winkler said the women were forced to be decontaminated.

“The second I heard what we had to do, I said that there was no way I’m going to get naked in front of a bunch of men,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I didn’t know what to cover, and all the men were watching and staring.”

During this decontamination process, the women removed their clothes and an all-male emergency staff hosed them with bleach water and scrubbed them with a brush, witnesses said.

“We were in an open lobby with open windows,” Winkler said. “And if there had been at least one woman, I would have felt more secure.”

Linton Hall employee Evette Chavez said because she resisted to be decontaminated, an officer threatened to arrest her, drag her down the hall and rip her clothes off.

“Another officer yelled to hurry up because I was putting his men in danger,” Chavez said.

She said random onlookers were able to watch them walk naked through the decontamination process. “I remember being ogled,” Chavez said. “I remember feeling that I had just been raped and crying all the way home.”

Carol Bahl, another Linton Hall staff member, said she took three showers after she was allowed to return to her home.

“I wondered why I felt I couldn’t get clean,” she said, adding that when the women met in group therapy, the therapist said their reactions mirrored those of sexual-assault victims.

Holly Rosen, director of MSU Safe Place, said in her experience as a victim advocate, “the closer a violation is to affecting someone’s body or their sense of comfort, the more long-lasting the trauma can be.”

And university physician Dr. Beth Alexander said, in retrospect, certain events of the day could have been handled differently. But she said responders weren’t prepared for the threat of bioterrorism and did their best to deal with the situation.

“They were used to blood and fire and crashes - but not bioterrorism,” she said.

She said she finds it ironic that people view the emergency response team as the “villains.”

“If it had been anthrax, and people’s lives had been saved, the same people who are seen as ‘not handling it well’ would be seen as heroes,” she said.

Elissa Englund can be reached at englunde@msu.edu