The superintendent of the Le Roy Central School District released a “letter to the community” Tuesday that left Erin Brockovich associate and environmental investigator Bob Bowcock with a strong response of his own.
A portion of Superintendent Kim Cox’s statement reads:
“Over the past few days, activities that have occurred in our community with respect to environmental testing by a representative who claimed to be working on behalf of Erin Brockovitch have taken center stage. This has been a distraction and taken us away from our mission to return normalcy to our school District, which every medical professional says is critical for the health and well-being of all students in our schools... It was clearly staged as a publicity stunt with members of local and national media invited to participate."
Read the full statement here.
Bowcock told HLN's Dr. Drew Tuesday night, "Erin and I have been together for over 15 years. We've investigated somewhere over 500 cases like this on an annual basis, of which over 100 of them we'll actually physically go out in the field much like we did in Le Roy. At every instance, we are invited into the community by the members of the community, by family members, and by people that are concerned about their environment and sickness.”
Dr. Drew asked Bowcock if he felt that his credibility was being called into question.
“Yes,” he responded. “I'm a big boy. And Erin and I have been called a lot of things over the years, but I think this is probably the first time we've ever been called criminal... when this was brought to my attention, there was a bit of an outrage and frankly that's downgraded to just kind of almost pathetically sad. “
Dr. Drew then asked Anne Rabe, a campaign coordinator for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, if the school should welcome in additional organizations.
“They should,” she said. “Our organization and others are calling for the state environmental and health agencies and the federal Environmental Protection Agency to work with the school. Those are the environmental health experts that should be working with the school to do a transparent environmental investigation that looks fully at whether there`s any possible toxic exposure pathways and rules them out, once and for all.”
To follow every update in this developing story, don't miss "Dr. Drew" weeknights at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on HLN and follow on Twitter @DrDrewHLN.
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