Karen Silkwood - Kilgore, TX - Grave of a Famous Person on Waymarking.com

From Imdb.com
"The story of Karen Silkwood, a metallurgy worker at a plutonium processing plant who was purposefully contaminated, psychologically tortured and possibly murdered to prevent her from exposing blatant worker safety violations at the plant."

Whether she was murdered or just died of an ordinary car accident, her remains are buried in Danville Cemetery.

Description: From findagrave: Social Reformer. Born in Longview, Texas, she studied medical technology at Lamar State College in Beaumont, Texas, on a scholarship. She was hired as a metallographic lab technician at the Cimarron River Plutonium Plant, operated by Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation, in Crescent, Oklahoma. On her first assignment to study plant health and safety issues, she discovered leaks, spills and potentially missing plutonium. She testified before the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that she had suffered radiation contamination, and she participated in a union strike against the company. Following work all day, on the evening of November 13, 1974, she attended a union meeting. At the end of the meeting, she left to meet with an AEC official and a New York Times reporter, to provide new evidence about the safety violations of the Kerr-McGee plant. She died in a one-car accident, which police estimated was due to her falling asleep at the wheel. A police autopsy showed that she had 0.35 mgs of Quaalude (a sleep inducing drug) in her blood, and 50 mgs of undissolved methaqualone in her stomach, more than twice the normal amount needed for sleep. The autopsy also confirmed that her lungs and stomach were contaminated with small amounts of plutonium, in levels acceptable to the AEC for exposure by atomic workers, confirming the trace amounts of plutonium that had been found in her apartment the week before. Her death has led to speculation about foul play, however, nothing was ever conclusively proven. Date of birth: 02/16/1946 Date of death: 11/13/1974 Area of notoriety: Science/Technology Marker Type: Headstone Setting: Outdoor Fee required?: No Web site: [Web Link] Visiting Hours/Restrictions: Not listed

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