HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
school for exposing their children
to suspected carcinogens without
their knowledge, they probably
wouldn’t have believed you.
But that’s what’s happening in
Briarcliff right now. For years, the
school let students play sports,
have recess, attend summer camp
and celebrate fall pep rallies with
bonfires on a pair of athletic fields
that were built on top of contaminated construction debris. At
least eight of those students, residents say, have had cancer.
“Three close to me,” Rosen
says, counting her friends who’ve
had cancer. “Demetri, Alex and
Nick.” She continues counting,
adding three more to the list.
“It’s a really small town, so you
know the names.”
Whether the suspected carcinogens in the soil of the Briarcliff
fields contributed to the startling number of cancer diagnoses
among young people in the area in
recent years can’t be known definitively. When it comes to environmental factors and cancer, cause
and effect is difficult to establish.
Even so, several parents in Briarcliff say they still want answers
about the athletic fields, why they
weren’t made more aware of possible problems in the first place,
and why someone other than
them got to choose whether their
children were exposed to toxins.
“I’m one of those really upset
parents,” says Mark Santiago, 62.
In order to get his children into
one of the local nursery schools
in Briarcliff when they were little,
Santiago recalls literally having
to work for them.
“You can’t buy them in,” he
says. “You agree to work there.”
That’s how for a time, Santiago, who works as a consultant,
became the school’s unofficial
painter. It’s been 29 years since
he moved to Briarcliff and he
remembers that the real estate
agent who sold him his house said
that Briarcliff High School was
the same as a private school.
Santiago sent his two children
to the high school, and by virtue of having a pool and a large
basement, his house became the
hang-out spot for his daughter
Olivia’s friends. One of those
friends was Demetri Demeropoulos, a varsity lacrosse player for
the school who died in May of
2010 from a spinal cord tumor at
the age of 18.
“In a town as small as ours,
when an 18-year-old dies, everyone
knows, but it was a couple degrees
SUDDEN
DEATH