Se­nior Mer­ck chemist charged with risk­ing cat­a­stro­phe af­ter pour­ing cyanide in­to Penn­syl­va­nia stormwa­ter drain

One of Mer­ck’s se­nior an­a­lyt­i­cal chemists has just been charged with reck­less­ly en­dan­ger­ing the lives of oth­ers near his home town of War­ring­ton, PA.

This all played out last De­cem­ber, when one of Richard O’Rourke’s col­leagues no­ticed him pour­ing 219 grams of potas­si­um cyanide he had picked up from the “poi­son cab­i­net” at Mer­ck in­to a Nal­gene bot­tle.

Ac­cord­ing to the po­lice and FBI, O’Rourke was steal­ing the cyanide to kills rats. But when the 60-year-old chemist no­ticed that he had been ob­served, he made an even worse choice in de­cid­ing to pour it out “in­to a stormwa­ter in­let in the area of Coun­ty Line Road and Street Road, be­tween Eas­t­on Road and Sec­ond Street Pike.”

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