One of Mer­ck’s se­nior an­a­lyt­i­cal chemists has just been charged with reck­less­ly en­dan­ger­ing the lives of oth­ers near his home town of War­ring­ton, PA.

Richard O’Rourke

This all played out last De­cem­ber, when one of Richard O’Rourke’s col­leagues no­ticed him pour­ing 219 grams of potas­si­um cyanide he had picked up from the “poi­son cab­i­net” at Mer­ck in­to a Nal­gene bot­tle.

Ac­cord­ing to the po­lice and FBI, O’Rourke was steal­ing the cyanide to kills rats. But when the 60-year-old chemist no­ticed that he had been ob­served, he made an even worse choice in de­cid­ing to pour it out “in­to a stormwa­ter in­let in the area of Coun­ty Line Road and Street Road, be­tween Eas­t­on Road and Sec­ond Street Pike.”

Lo­cal of­fi­cials scram­bled to start test­ing the wa­ter in the area to see if any­one would be ex­posed, but de­ter­mined that a hard rain had ev­i­dent­ly flushed it out with­out harm­ing any­one.

“It is con­cern­ing that some­one was able to re­move such a poi­so­nous chem­i­cal, but thank­ful­ly through an im­me­di­ate and swift re­sponse by many peo­ple, no­body was hurt,” said Mont­gomery Coun­ty Dis­trict At­tor­ney Kevin Steele in a state­ment.

O’Rourke has been charged with caus­ing or risk­ing cat­a­stro­phe, theft, re­ceiv­ing stolen prop­er­ty and reck­less­ly en­dan­ger­ing an­oth­er per­son. He post­ed $35,000 bail and was re­leased, pend­ing a hear­ing next month.