By mid-July, the attorney F. Bryan Brice, Jr., and his client Dr. Darren Masier, an assistant professor of human resource management at Meredith College, had petitioned for an independent examination of the potential cancer cluster at Poe Hall at North Carolina State University (NC State).
Getting access to perform testing has been Brice and Masier’s goal since they first filed a motion for discovery in February, in hopes that they could better identify what toxins at Poe Hall might have contributed to Masier’s acute myeloid leukemia. While a judge initially ruled in their favor, NC State appealed and put a stop to all potential outside testing within Poe Hall.
Dr. Darren Masier
“We see things marked on Geosyntec’s testing that we believe needs to be done in order to get a more comprehensive picture of what the exposure issues may be for the people who spent time in Poe Hall, our clients and others,” says Brice.
Brice says he has fielded calls from over 250 people, including former students, staff, faculty, and administrators who spent time in Poe Hall and have since become sick with cancers or other illnesses. NC State discovered toxic PCBs in Poe Hall in October 2023, and the psychology and education building has been shut down since November 2023.
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are manmade, highly carcinogenic chemical compounds, previously used in numerous building materials before being banned in the U.S. through the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1979. PCBs are also known to cause cancer and other serious health effects on the immune, reproductive, nervous, and endocrine system, among other impacts, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
By the time NC State closed Poe Hall, Masier was waist-deep in chemotherapy to treat his leukemia. At the time, he had no notion of the possibility of a link between his time at NC State and his surprising cancer development. Masier spent hours within Poe Hall as a graduate student and assistant between 2009 and 2013.
