Go out to eat and die
tiny dancer
By JIM AUCHMUTEY
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
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.
Phil Skinner / AJC
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 ca
lled "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."