As claims and lawsuits pile up against the government related to contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune, the number of grievous health outcomes tied to exposure to those toxic chemicals at the Marine Corps base in North Carolina is also rising.
A growing percentage of cases are becoming wrongful death suits rather than damage claims for illnesses as more Marines and their family members who were sickened by the tainted water, often many years after the exposure, lose their lives, according to several people involved in the litigation.
“A lot of these people are elderly and they’re up there in age,” said Mike Partain, a Florida man born at Camp Lejeune in 1968 and diagnosed with breast cancer, an extremely rare disease in men, in 2007. “Is this going to legally just take so long that most of us are dead before anything happens?”
