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11/03/02
Stephen Hudak and John F. Hagan Plain Dealer Reporters

In 1983, as a teenage dad, Tony Coleman worked six dusty days a week as a mechanic in South Euclid.

Not even taking time to change clothes after work, Coleman raced home to his girlfriend, where their baby greeted him, chubby arms raised. The new dad gathered him up like a flower.

"From the time I walked in the door till the time for bed, he'd be in my lap," Tony said. "I was not going to be a father who wasn't there. I was going to make things better for him."

He read to the boy, fed and bathed him.

He fears now that he poisoned him, too.

David Coleman, who turned 19 in September, is dying from a frightening cancer that lawyers trace to his dad's job fixing brakes lined with asbestos. The fiber is the only known cause of the disease.

His is the latest tragic chapter in the sad, unceasing saga of asbestos.

Although asbestos all but disappeared from American industry more than

30 years ago, the one-time wonder mineral is still killing people, crippling industry and paralyzing court dockets.

A new generation of Americans who never worked with asbestos but who were exposed at home or school are among the more than 5,000 who die from asbestos-related cancer each year. Some have discovered that the seeds of their disease were planted innocently and long ago in a laundry room, while shaking asbestos dust from clothes, or in a basement, helping dad fix the furnace.

Asbestos is wreaking havoc on courts struggling with lawsuits against not only the companies that produced and distributed it, but also firms that used products containing it.

More than 200,000 asbestos lawsuits jam dockets coast-to-coast and name 6,000 defendants. In Cuyahoga County, 34,000 claims monopolize the time of two judges brought out of retirement. Because of the glut of asbestos lawsuits - many filed by people who were exposed to asbestos but are not yet ill - some of the sickest victims will die before their cases are resolved.

The burden of paying asbestos claims has sucked billions from thousands of otherwise-healthy companies, pushing 62 into bankruptcy - more than 20 since Jan. 1, 2000.

Although most reorganized and still operate, a few went out of business.

Asbestos bankruptcies are bad for almost everyone, said former Judge James McMonagle, trustee for the fund that pays workers injured by products manufactured by Eagle-Picher in Cincinnati.

They delay compensation for those suffering from asbestos-related disease and waste limited assets on lawyers, he said. For employees, they threaten jobs and retirement plans.

So far, asbestos has cost American companies and their insurers a staggering $54 billion to settle and fight cases. Some experts estimate the final bill will exceed $275 billion, more than the combined cost of 9/11's terror attacks, Enron and Hurricane Andrew.

Some blame greedy lawyers for inflating settlement costs. Others say companies would have saved money if they had acknowledged asbestos' danger sooner and taken action.

The cost has been so high that manufacturers and the children and widows of injured workers have begged Congress to intercede. But the never-ending asbestos crisis poses thorny political questions for lawmakers twice challenged by the U.S. Supreme Court to find a legislative solution.

Who should be compensated, by whom and for how much?

The crisis is worsening rather than improving, according to the RAND Institute for Civil Justice, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research firm that has studied asbestos lawsuits for 20 years.

The problems have grown so bad because asbestos worked so well.

Called the miracle mineral because it was strong as piano wire yet flexible as thread, asbestos was used in 5,000 products from roofing shingles to floor tiles, from cigarette filters to toothpaste.

In gloves, it shielded foundry workers pouring molten steel. Asbestos brake shoes made school buses stop quicker and safer. As building insulation, the fibrous mineral saved energy.

But the same indestructible properties that made it industry's ally made it the mortal enemy of workers who inhaled it building ships, skyscrapers and homes.

The abundant, cheap and versatile fibers turned out to be sneaky killers, secretly scarring lungs of workers who toiled amid them and strangling them with their own tissue years later.

Besides asbestosis, they spawned mesothelioma, a deadly cancer that hides in the body for as long as 40 years. Cases diagnosed today can be traced to exposure as long ago as the 1960s. The untreatable cancer killed actor Steve McQueen and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt.

Mesothelioma is the deadliest and longest reaching legacy of asbestos, killing not only unsuspecting men and women who worked in its dust but sometimes spouses and children, too.

The hopelessness of mesothelioma makes claims costly to settle.

Unlike asbestosis, which is caused by heavy exposure over long periods of time, mesothelioma appears more menacing. Some medical experts insist a single inhaled asbestos fiber can cause cancer, an opinion that has been hotly debated by doctors.

From 1995 through 2000, the most recent years for available statistics, 350 Ohioans died of mesothelioma, a disease that is said to be rare. Related cancers have killed thousands more.

While asbestos is no longer widely used in the United States and Congress is considering a complete ban, doctors find hundreds of new cases of mesothelioma every year.

David Coleman's doctors found his while fixing a hernia in his belly.

He was 15 and a freshman soccer star, dreaming of a pro career.

"They weren't sure at first what it was. Then they couldn't even pronounce it," Tony Coleman said. "They started doing histories and asking us questions: Where did you work, things like that."

Searching the Internet for answers, the Colemans also examined their past to see how their son may have been exposed to a substance they believed had been banned before he was born.

"We couldn't put it all together at first," said David's mother, Annette Coleman.

Annette and Tony were barely teenagers themselves when asbestos became a public health crisis in the 1970s. They remembered the government spent millions to take it out of schools.

The Colemans, who hired lawyers and have sued automakers and brake suppliers, insist David's cancer was caused by the asbestos in brake dust Tony carried home on his work clothes.

"It hurts to think he might be better if I hadn't been there," Tony said. "I'm constantly told it's not my fault but every time I see him sick and suffering, I can't help but think, What if. . . . ' "

He said he wasn't told about asbestos' lethal secret.

"It wasn't talked about. You just did the job," he said.

Tony Coleman stopped working under cars more than a decade ago. He joined the Air Force and has risen to a post supervising mechanics who keep the nation's fighter jets flying.

After he and Annette married, the Air Force moved them to the fresh farmlands of Nebraska in 1986, then to Texas in 1997. They have two younger children, Durell and Ariel.

No other family members are sick. None has ever smoked.

While mesothelioma usually occurs in people who know where they were exposed to asbestos, it sometimes occurs for no apparent, traceable reason, lawyers for automakers argue.

The companies' lawyers have probed for other possible sources, asking David if anything ever blew up while he was in chemistry class and whether he played in the attic as a kid.

Meanwhile, David's family considers every experimental treatment.

While doctors have been blunt - most victims of mesothelioma die within a year of diagnosis - David has endured therapies that make him weak and have pushed him near death.

Twice, hospice workers have come to care for him. Last year, Make-A-Wish sent the tired family to Hawaii.

"We do it because we don't have any other choice," Tony said of his son's medical trials. "When he tells me that's all he can handle, then we'll stop. It's his choice. He knows the alternative."

David, who once dreamed of leading his country to its first ever World Cup soccer championship, now has a much more modest goal.

"I want to grow old," he said.

Tomorrow: A Brook Park factory that stopped using asbestos 25 years ago has paid millions to families of employees who died of cancer and disease linked to the deadly fibers.

To reach these Plain Dealer reporters:

shudak@plaind.com, 1-800-683-7348
jhagan@plaind.com, 1-216-999-4169
News researchers Patti Graziano and Cheryl Diamond contributed to this report.