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Leslie Scales and John Hernandez bring their children, Hunter and Jade, to visit the grave of their son Forrest, who died at the age of 5. Sentinel photo by Bill Lovejoy.

The sky was clearing after a summer rain when 5-year-old Forrest Hernandez walked down to the creek with his father. Forrest went everywhere with his dad. They’d go to the auto parts store together. They’d explore the woods together near their little cabin outside of Willits, in the mountains of Northern California.

So it was normal that Forrest would go down to the creek to play while his dad, John Hernandez, tried to coax some life into an old Volkswagen van parked there.

At one point, Forrest took a sip of creek water.

Thirty-six hours later, Forrest was dead.

What killed Forrest?

Forrest’s death shattered Hernandez and his wife, Leslie Scales, setting them on a three-year search to discover what killed their son, the little boy who loved Batman and hated wearing shoes.

Their search led them to a sprawling chrome-plating factory in the center of Willits, where a soup of chemicals had leached into the ground, and to a group of ex-workers and neighbors, whose litany of illnesses read like a medical textbook.

Cancers. Strange tumors. Nosebleeds that were almost unstoppable. Headaches, stomach aches, birth defects.

Authorities said the old chrome factory couldn’t have had anything to do with Forrest’s death.

They were so sure, in fact, they didn’t even test the creek water or the boy’s tissues for chemicals.

Hernandez and Scales weren’t convinced.

Armed with a legal dictionary and a computer, they set to work.

Last week, they reached a victory of sorts.

Lawyer Ed Masry and environmental sleuth Erin Brockovich (both made famous in a Hollywood movie) agreed to take the couple’s case — and the case of several hundred people in Willits who say they have been made ill by toxic chemicals from the plant.

The state also launched a criminal investigation into the factory’s alleged illegal dumping.

"It’s not just us anymore," says Hernandez, sitting in the one-bedroom apartment where he and Scales and their two children now live in Santa Cruz.

"A lot of stuff is going to come out. The sickness of the town and how much their water is contaminated."

He stops to pick up 3-year-old Hunter, who plays around his feet. Settles the dark-haired little boy on his lap.

"Forrest found out the secret that was being kept in that town."

Our Batman forever

Hernandez and Scales were between houses when they went up to Willits in 1997.

He was a Vietnam vet who had been with the 101st Airborne.

During the war, Hernandez and six or seven other guys would be dropped alone into the jungle near the DMZ to hunt for Vietcong. They were considered the Army’s elite force.

Hernandez won a Purple Heart.

Back in the states, he worked as a carpenter.

Scales had wanted to be a journalist; but when Forrest was born, the woman with the long, dark hair became a full-time mom.

Her second son, Hunter, was a few months old when they lost their rental house in Ben Lomond and decided to go to Willits for a while.

"Our friend had a cabin that needed work and a car that needed work," says Hernandez, who wears his graying hair in a long ponytail. "I said I would do it, so we went up there."

The little cabin was two miles up a canyon on a winding dirt road.

It was a pretty place with oak-studded hills and tall golden grass. A creek cut through the property, and it ran so clear Hernandez and Scales would park their van on one side and wade through it to get to the cabin.

"We didn’t want to ruin it," Scales says, shaking her head at the memory.

On Aug. 21, after a summer rain, Hernandez noticed the creek had a yellowish foam on it and saw a dead fish near its banks.

When he and Forrest went down to the creek to work on the van, he told the barefoot little boy not to drink from the creek.

"He was playing over there, making a little bridge out of rocks and he says, ‘I’m a big boy and I can drink this water,’" Hernandez says, remembering how he turned just in time to see the boy scoop up a handful of water and drink it.

"I told him, ‘Oh no, you might get sick,’" Hernandez says.

But Forrest seemed all right, even eating some canned chili and trail mix for breakfast the next day.

By noon, Forrest had diarrhea and began to vomit.

By 5 p.m., Hernandez and Scales were worried.

Forrest was a hemophiliac. In June of that year, they had been told that vomiting, lethargy and diarrhea could be indications of bleeding problems.

Forrest had a cut on his head from two weeks earlier, but the cut wasn’t bleeding and there were no other signs of injury. Still, Hernandez drove into town and called Stanford Children’s Hospital.

Hernandez says he was told to check Forrest for bruises or cuts and any swelling. He found nothing and figured the little boy’s illness was not related to his hemophilia.

"We had already connected his being sick with the water," Hernandez says.

Three hours later, he was worried enough to drive back down the road and call the hospital in Willits.

Forrest’s symptoms sounded like the flu, Hernandez remembers the nurse saying. She told him it was up to him if he wanted to bring Forrest in.

"We decided to wait and see if he got better," Hernandez says.

Hernandez drove Forrest back up to the cabin.

"I sat with him all night long," Hernandez says, remembering how the little boy kept asking for ice and water.

About 2:15 a.m., Forrest turned to his dad.

"I just want to feel good. I just want to be happy," he said.

Then his eyes rolled back in his head.

Hernandez scooped up Forrest and yelled for Scales, who grabbed Hunter and ran with him through the creek to their van.

Hernandez covers his face with his hands, remembering the mad dash into the night carrying his little boy. The way he knew Forrest was already dead.

The apartment in Santa Cruz goes quiet. The only sounds are the voices of his two sons playing outside with a neighbor.

"It was only three miles down to the hospital," Hernandez says, his voice cracking.

"I did CPR on him all the way to the hospital, but he didn’t come to."

Emergency room doctors worked on Forrest for 30 minutes.

He was pronounced dead at 2:57 a.m. Aug. 22.

Forrest’s parents think it’s ironic that on the same day Forrest died, a Fortune 500 company named Whitman signed an agreement with the city of Willits to begin cleaning up the old chrome factory site.

Hernandez and Scales buried Forrest in Santa Cruz.

"Our sonshine, our batman forever," reads his headstone.

Evidence ‘wasn’t there’

It’s still hard for Mendocino County Sheriff’s Cpt. Kevin Broin to scrub the image of Forrest Hernandez’s body from his mind

Broin had an 8-year-old son, after all.

He remembers the dark-haired little boy lying on the autopsy table, his feet still dirty from playing outside.

He remembers how the parents were worried there was something in the creek water that had killed their son.

He sent deputies up to collect a water sample and check the foliage around the creek, but they didn’t see anything. He did the required tests for possible poisoning from things like cocaine, marijuana or Valium.

Still, he says, he didn’t discount the Hernandez family’s theory until the autopsy.

Standing next to the pathologist, Broin watched as the doctor found nothing wrong with Forrest’s throat or his gastrointestinal tract.

The little boy’s liver was OK. His stomach looked fine.

But inside Forrest’s abdominal cavity, the doctor found three liters of blood and a hemorrhage of the boy’s lesser omentum, a thin fold of membrane that passes between the stomach and the liver.

The pathologist ruled that Forrest had gone into shock from major blood loss.

Broin sits in his Ukiah office, an old leather football helmet on a file cabinet behind him. He is a tall man with sandy blond hair and a trim build. He’s been a cop for 17 years.

Hernandez and Scales seemed to mistrust law enforcement from the minute he started the investigation, Broin says, flipping through a thin file on the case.

He tried to be as compassionate as possible, he says, but the autopsy findings just didn’t fit with the theory of tainted creek water.

Besides, Broin says, the old chrome plating plant is two miles downstream from where Forrest drank from the creek.

"It wasn’t even reasonable that things would go upstream," he says.

So after consulting with experts, he decided not to test the creek water or the tissues taken from the little boy’s body for the heavy metal Chromium VI, as the parents asked.

"I get a lot of theories; and if I went off and routinely tested every one of them, I would waste a lot of people’s time and money," Broin says.

"The evidence just wasn’t there."

Chromium VI, a carcinogen, and a host of other solvents were used at the chrome factory. Because of the yellow foam in the creek, Forrest’s parents suspected that Chromium VI could be what caused their son’s death.

Research shows that in 1970 a 14-year-old boy died eight days after accidentally swallowing Chromium VI in chemistry class. His liver and kidneys were almost destroyed. His digestive tract was covered with sores.

When a group of Chinese villagers drank from their Chromium VI-contaminated well in the ‘70s, they reported diarrhea, abdominal pain, vomiting and mouth sores.

But nothing in Forrest’s death pointed to poisoning, Broin says.

Experts told him the boy could have spontaneously bled to death, or injured himself while vomiting.

The only mistake in the investigation, Broin says, was that he never checked for E.coli; and by the time he realized that, it was too late to do the test.

The tissue and water samples were destroyed after a year.

"I’m not here to cause pain to the family. I’m not sitting in judgment," Broin says.

But he believes the parents should have taken their son to the hospital earlier. That they should have known their son’s illness could have signaled problems related to his hemophilia.

"I still believe everything was done to find out how this death happened," Broin says. "The only question is: Why did the hemorrhage start in the first place?"

No one knows the answer.

Dr. Richard Mason, a noted forensic pathologist in Los Gatos, agreed that the autopsy results did not seem to point to poisoning.

"I would still think, given their autopsy findings that the lining of the esophagus, stomach and gut were intact, that speaks against Chromium ingestion," he says.

"But if I had the case," Mason says, "I would have answered that question."

A plume of problems

It’s easy to miss the old Remco chrome-plating factory, even though it sits almost directly under the arch that proclaims Willits "Gateway to the Redwoods" and is within throwing distance of the famous Skunk Train rail line.

But the folks who live next door to the factory in the working-class neighborhood on Franklin Avenue say they can’t forget Remco, not with all the illnesses and birth defects around.

Until the soil and the groundwater is cleaned up and scientists give them answers about the effects of living so close to this chemical soup, they say they’ll remember .

Remco began chrome plating in 1963, making steering mechanisms for nuclear submarines and weapons, along with offshore drilling equipment and tunneling tools.

By the time the Vietnam War came, the factory was running shifts 24 hours a day.

Most people thought it was great to have so many good-paying jobs. They liked to tell stories of how kind the factory’s founder, Bob Harrah, was.

But even then, there were problems.

In 1971 authorities reported that nearby Baechtel Creek had turned yellow from Chromium VI waste from the plant.

People say the water looked like Mountain Dew.

The spot was right where kids had their swimming hole, they say.

Three years later, chromic acid was found in storm water runoff.

Men who worked at Remco tell stories of solvents like toluene being dumped into the storm drain and Chromium VI being pumped out of tanks and into a ditch that went right into Baechtel Creek behind the Safeway store.

There were so many leaks and spills in the factory, the chromic acid would eat holes in their shoes, they say.

Brad McCartney, who worked at Remco in the late ‘80s, testified that, three times, someone on the night shift turned on water to fill up the chrome tanks and forgot to turn it off.

In the morning, workers came in to find Chromium VI-laced water running into a ditch.

Once, a huge cylinder fell and punctured a hole in a seven-story deep chrome plating tank, leaking Chromium VI into the ground water.

Clay Romero, a slight man with dark, receding hair, leans against the wall of his neat metal fabrication plant outside of town and remembers what things were like at Remco.

They would use 1-1-1 trichloroethane to clean grease from gun mortars before they were plated, he says.

"Sometimes the tanks would get polluted with oil, and we needed to get rid of that," Romero says.

"I would be told to pull the plug on the tank. It would run on the ground, and that bugged me terribly.

"I knew it was wrong."

By the time, the plant shut down in 1995, the seven-acre parcel of land was a hotbed of waste.

The level of Chromium VI on the site is one of the highest Janice Goebel of the Regional Water Board has seen.

It was measured at 400,000 parts per billion in some spots.

The state’s public health goal is 0.2 parts per billion.

"It’s a significant site," Goebel says.

The city of Willits, which depends on tourism now that the lumber industry is dying out, didn’t want a toxic soup in the middle of town.

It looked around and sued Whitman, a Chicago company that owns PepsiCola Bottling Co. Whitman once had ties to Remco that, a judge ruled, made it liable.

On Aug. 22, 1997 — the day Forrest Hernandez died — Whitman signed an agreement with the city to form a trust to clean up the site.

So far, said Roxanne Smith, a spokesperson for Whitman, the company has paid or lent $11 million to the Trust charged with cleaning up the Remco site.

"Whitman," she says, "is committed to a full cleanup of the site."

Neighbors are not so sure.

They say they don’t believe reports that it’s safe to live near Remco.

They question why a former Remco manager has been hired to run tests on the site, and why the woman who heads the Trust was once hired by Whitman to testify as an expert witness in the case.

They say they have evidence there was radioactive materials at the site, even though Trust officials say there weren’t.

"We have no trust in the Trust," says Pam Arlich, who lived near the plant for eight years.

Strange things going on

Donna Avila’s white bungalow butts right up against the old, metal-sided Remco plant.

She never thought much about the funny sweet smell that came from the plant or the strange yellow water.

She was just a housewife, raising her four kids, she says.

But in 1998, doctors found a tumor in her uterus and she had a hysterectomy.

While she was laid up, she began to talk to the people on her street — waitresses, mill workers, heavy equipment operators, the town’s ice cream lady.

There was the woman with cervical cancer and a son born with strange skin flaps on his foot and hip.

There were two neighbors with fatty tumors that popped up on their body. There was a man with an oozing rash that wouldn’t go away, and children whose noses would suddenly gush blood.

There were housewives who said their kids had trouble learning and even concentrating.

She began to hear rumors around town. Of a baby born with four arms and a boy with seven nipples on his chest. Of a baby born with no sex organs.

Then she heard about the death of Forrest Hernandez.

"I said, ‘What the hell?’" remembers Avila, a straight-talking blond who sometimes packs a 9 mm automatic in her purse.

"It seems like all the neighbors had some kind of freaky tumor. All the government said was, it was nothing."

She started going door to door, assembling a map that showed all the illnesses: pink pins for rashes, silver pins for birth defects, black for death.

The map leans against the wall in her dining room, a thicket of pins that radiate out from the Remco site.

Some people in town don’t like Avila and her partner Pam Arlich, another housewife who says her family is sick. But Avila doesn’t care. She’s sure there’s a link between all the illnesses and the old Remco factory, and she’s not quiet about it.

She points out factory fans that she says blew chemical dust and fumes right at the Baechtel Grove Middle School. She climbs down a steep embankment at Baechtel Creek to show the weird stains and the funny smell.

"I’m an activist now. They’ve poisoned my family and poisoned my friends," says Avila, 48.

"It sounds bad to say this, but they’ve killed us."

Others would disagree.

No immediate risk

While no one disputes that toxic chemicals leached into the ground at Remco, there’s controversy over exactly what it means for the town.

"There has been a lot of finger-pointing: that, hey, this causes everything from stuttering to tumors to birth defects, and it may ultimately prove to be the case," says A. J. Birkbeck, a Chicago attorney who works for the Trust that is overseeing the cleanup.

"But," he says, "the science isn’t there right now."

The biggest risk, he says, would have been to the men who worked in the plant and breathed Chromium VI, a known carcinogen.

But no cancer cluster has been found in Willits, according to the head of the Mendocino County Health Department.

Still the state is doing more studies to see if any health problems in town might be linked to the Remco site, Birkbeck says.

Some residents say birth defects are on the rise in their little town, but no study has been done to count them.

A 1999 study showed birth defects are increasing across the United States, but researchers don’t know if the jump is related to things like toxins and smoking, or just better reporting of problems to medical authorities.

An early study done by the Trust says there are no immediate health risks to residents from the Remco site, according to Dr. Anne Farr, a groundwater expert in charge of the Trust.

Tests show Chromium VI is pretty much contained on the Remco property, although it has seeped under part of a motel and a small market, she says.

Solvents used at the factory have leached into the groundwater under Avila’s neighborhood, but don’t appear to have moved any farther, Farr says. A February study of the creek where kids once swam also shows no detectable levels of Chromium VI.

Since the town’s drinking water comes from a reservoir several miles away, nobody is getting doses of chemicals in their drinking water, Birkbeck says.

Chromium VI is nasty stuff, however.

It is classified as a carcinogen.

Breathing Chromium VI over a long period of time can cause nose bleeds and lung problems.

Drinking Chromium VI can cause stomach problems, ulcers, and kidney and liver damage.

Mice who were fed Chromium VI had reproductive problems and babies with birth defects.

The facts are enough to make lots of people who lived around the plant nervous.

Some say the Remco factory isn’t the only polluted place in town.

They believe chemicals from the plant were taken off and dumped elsewhere — places, they say, like the spot where Forrest Hernandez died.

Waste to go?

Billy and Brenda McCann have moved off Franklin Avenue, but they are suspicious of what happened there.

Brenda sits under the shade of a tree on her front lawn and ticks off the list of problems: Her father worked in the chrome room at Remco and died of kidney and lung cancer at the age of 64. One daughter was born with a tumor on her spine, the other has a dozen fibroids in her ovaries. Billy has seven fatty tumors popping up on his arm, one the size of a golf ball.

She and Billy, an ex-lumber mill worker with a Johnny Cash voice, think chemicals have something to do with their problems, and say they know chemicals were trucked off the Remco site.

Once in 1974, says Billy, a truck came down their street from the Remco plant.

It was spraying something that looked like water, and the spray got all over their ‘68 Dodge Charger.

"It ate the paint off the car," Bill says.

Brenda’s dad told him the stuff had come from the chrome room at Remco.

Billy went to Remco to complain, and they told him to have the car repainted and send them the bill.

"They rented us a ‘74 Chevy Malibu," Billy says.

"We went on vacation."

Officials acknowledge one off-site waste dump has been found, a place called Page Pits located a couple miles northeast of town, downstream from the factory.

Avila and others believe there are more dump sites — up to eight, they say.

The state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control confirmed it is looking into criminal charges in connection with illegal dumping of chemicals from the site, but officials wouldn’t say more.

Whitman spokesman Roxanne Smith says the company is not aware of any criminal investigation.

Trust officials say they want to hear any specifics about off-site dumping. But until it gets them, "It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack," Farr says.

Whatever is there, it was enough to convince Ed Masry, the gruff environmental attorney portrayed in the Julia Roberts movie, "Erin Brockovich," that the town and its residents have a problem.

Reports from residents coming into his office now show, "there might be a higher ratio of various diseases than should be in a town like Willits," says Masry.

He agrees with authorities, however, that it is currently safe to live there.

Still Brockovich and her team are poring through records and conducting tests to figure out exactly what is going on in the little town located 240 miles north of Santa Cruz.

Bill Simpich, an Oakland civil rights attorney who is co-counsel with Masry, is not so sure it’s safe to live next to Remco.

"The people of Willits should fence off that entire block of houses and the plant and declare it a monument to human stupidity," he says

Finally taking a breath

Scales and Hernandez couldn’t believe chemicals from Remco had nothing to do with their son’s death.

They remembered the yellow foam and the dead fish.

They began to do research. They took their own samples of creek water and Forrest’s vomit to a Watsonville lab to see if it was contaminated with Chromium VI.

But there are two kinds of Chromium, one of them harmless; and Chromium VI quickly converts to the harmless kind, says Phil Carpenter, president of ToxScan where the tests were done.

While the lab tested only for total Chromium, doing further tests would have been "pointless" since the samples were so old, says Carpenter.

Besides, he says, the levels of total Chromium — 49 parts per billion in Forrest’s vomit — didn’t seem particularly high.

But Scales and Hernandez didn’t stop.

Their son would have been more sensitive to chemicals, they believe, and everything they learned about Remco made them more suspicious.

They wrote letters and filed their own lawsuit, doing their work early in the morning at the local cyber laundromat, spending thousands to print up documents at Kinkos.

They begged attorneys to take their case.

"To mourn over your kid’s body. To investigate your kid’s death is harder than Vietnam," Hernandez says from their apartment, which is cluttered with toys and books.

"His death tied that whole experience together for me."

He remembers hiking through the jungle of northern Vietnam, not knowing which villagers were friends or foe.

"It was the same thing," he says, "where you didn’t know who the enemy was."

Finally, after a friend took them to see the "Erin Brockovich" movie, they sent a letter to the firm which won a $333 million settlement from PG&E for polluting a town’s drinking water with Chromium VI.

"Erin did the research and investigation and she recommended ... we take the case," says Masry, whose firm gets hundreds of requests from people who want him to represent them.

"With Masry on board, we can finally take a breath," says Scales. "After three years we can breathe."

Not everyone in Willits is as happy about the publicity.

"I think it’s being blown way out of proportion," says Mike Willcutt, a regular on the back patio of the Willits Cafe, where the cigarette smokes hangs as low as a summer fog.

He echoes the thoughts of a number of Willits residents.

"I don’t think it’s as serious as they say it is. It’s not going to kill us all," Willcutt says.

He takes a sip of coffee from a thick mug.

"They just want some change in their pockets. It’s what everybody wants: money."

"I carried the urinal for my dad," says Brenda McCann, sitting in the shade of the front yard while her Rhodesian Ridgeback, Bubba, lounges nearby. "I washed his body and they tell me, I’m doing it for the money?"

Back in Santa Cruz, Scales pulls out Forrest’s baby book.

There’s a picture she drew on the day he was born, an ink drawing of a creek running from the hills through the woods.

It’s just like where Forrest died, she says, running her hand over the drawing and the photograph of Forrest when he was hours old.

"I don’t know what’s going on," she says, "But it’s bigger than us."

The Willits Trust is still performing tests of chemicals at the site. It’s also running a pilot project to see if pumping lime sulfur mixed with molasses into the ground water will convert the toxic Chromium VI to the harmless Chromium III.

A federal judge plans to come to town Oct. 30 to listen to residents about the court order that set up the Willits Trust. John Hernandez and Leslie Scales say they will be there. Their lawsuit is pending.

Contact Peggy Townsend at ptownsend@santa-cruz.com.

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