Then-Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse argues before Judge Michael A. Silverstein, at Superior Court, in 2000, in defense of the state’s suit, on behalf of lead-poisoned children, against the manufacturers of lead paint pigment and their trade associations.

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THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL / JOHN FREIDAH

The first person attorney Jack McConnell called last Tuesday with news of the Rhode Island Supreme Court’s big decision on the state’s landmark lead paint case was Liz Colon. She was having a meeting in her office, and what McConnell said left her speechless.

“He said, ‘we lost.’

“And I lost my breath for a second. I was shocked. I said, ‘Are you serious?’ ” Colon recalls.

“I was at a loss for words, and I don’t think I’m ever at a loss for words.”

Rhode Island made history in 2006 when six jurors brought the first verdict against lead pigment manufacturers for creating a public nuisance with their poisonous paints. On Tuesday, the state Supreme Court brought what it called a “monumental lawsuit” to an end when it agreed, 4 to 0, to overturn.

Few people had as much invested as Liz Colon in the state’s historic lawsuit. Colon’s son, Sam, was seriously lead-poisoned as a baby. Not long afterward, she was among the community activists who met with newly elected Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse in 1998 and asked him to sue the paint companies.

Passionate about lead poisoning, she became a community organizer with the one advocacy group representing families of lead-poisoning victims, the Childhood Lead Action Project.

When Whitehouse sued the companies, the state presented Colon as one of its witnesses for the first of two trials. She was grilled for seven hours in depositions. But, in the end, the judge didn’t let her testify.

“The judge said I was too biased, and I had no credentials,” she says with a shrug.

Colon is often the face of CLAP. She has testified before a U.S. Senate Committee, at the State House and before community groups. She is confident and unafraid of mixing it up with doctors, lawyers and politicians.

“She is the real deal,” says McConnell.

“Liz Colon’s story is worthy of a Hollywood film,” adds Patrick MacRoy, who met her as a Brown University graduate student, and stayed connected through his work as an epidemiologist at the Rhode Island Health Department and then as the head of a national advocacy group, the Alliance for Healthy Homes.

“To see her development into one of the nation’s foremost advocates after having started as a concerned mother is truly inspiring.”

Colon seems embarrassed by such praise.

“I wear my heart on my sleeve,” she says, with her typical smile. “I don’t try to pretend I’m something I’m not. For me, this is real.”

Colon admits that 12 years ago, she had little confidence. She was nearly overwhelmed with guilt and anger. It felt like the bottom fell out of her life.

At first, things were going well. She and Jorge had a baby, Sam. They got married. And they bought a house on Winsor Street in Providence.

“It was a fixer-upper,” Colon says. Her husband was working in a factory. She had an older boy, Damian. For a young woman who hadn’t graduated from high school, things were moving in the right direction.

Then came Sept. 15, 1996. She’ll never forget the date.

Sam had a physical a month earlier, near his first birthday. The doctor said Sam had a lead level of 36 micrograms per deciliter, more than three times what is now considered poisoned.

The family was referred to a lead clinic. It was there, on Sept. 15, that doctors found his blood lead level jumped to 52. Sam was hospitalized for four days so efforts could be made to reduce the lead in his body.

Life for the family fell into chaos.

They rushed home and mopped every surface in their house. They duct taped all the woodwork to try to encase the lead paint.

Even after they brought Sam home, the whole family had to hold him down while they forced him to take a medicine mixed with ice cream. It smelled like sulfur, so the family had to force it into Sam every time.

The next year, the family took out a loan to replace the 23 windows in the house. They later took out three more loans to redo the interior and then the exterior, and then the exterior again when all the paint from the first job began peeling off.

Sam didn’t seem to grow from 18 months to 36 months, says Colon. Even now, his little brother, Nathan, is almost as big as Sam is.

Everybody else in the family has perfect teeth. But lead destroys tooth enamel. Sam, 12, has already had many fillings and a few crowns.

For a long time he had stomach problems.

Sam is in middle school now and struggling with some issues, such as multitasking and short-term memory, according to his mother.

But he says his grades are good. And he has his mother’s same cheerful attitude.

In 1997, a nurse who also had a lead-poisoned child invited Colon to a meeting at Rhode Island Hospital for professionals to discuss lead poisoning. The room was crowded with doctors and nurses all talking about lead poisoning as if it were something everyone shared, like the common cold.

Colon said it was the first time she spoke out in public. She was terrified.

“I said I couldn’t believe all of you know about this issue, because I can tell you, the public doesn’t know. I didn’t know.”

Soon, Colon was volunteering with CLAP, the advocacy group, trying to help other parents. In 1999, CLAP hired her part-time as a community organizer. Colon got her GED and took some courses at CCRI.

Colon said CLAP executive director Robert Hazen Aronson was an incredibly supportive mentor.

Soon, Colon was at the State House, telling the story of what happened to Sam and supporting a tougher state law to reduce lead poisonings.

In May 2001, The Providence Journal published a six-part series called Poisoned that focused on the young victims of lead poisoning and explained the related health, educational and legal issues.

The series seemed to heighten attention in the General Assembly, where two lead bills were fought over until the final hours of the session. Both died.

But the next year, the General Assembly finally passed legislation that allowed the state to proactively encourage landlords to make apartments lead safe.

Passage of the bill followed some of the most contentious and crowded hearings in recent years. Landlords and apartment owners insisted the bill would drive up costs and leave more people homeless.

Since the new housing regulations went into effect, more than 23,500 landlords and homeowners have attended three-hour seminars on making their buildings safe. About 15,000 apartments and homes have been inspected and certified as lead safe.

“I think we’ve seen a cultural change in a couple of years,” says Noreen Shawcross, executive director of the Rhode Island Housing Resources Commission. “We used to get angry calls. People just yelling at us. We don’t get those anymore. These regulations aren’t that bad. They just mandate basic living standards. We haven’t seen it cause any homelessness.”

Meanwhile, the lawsuit dragged on. First there were eight defendants. Over time the judge narrowed the field of defendants, and in the end there were just four. A first trial ended in a split vote by the jury. A mistrial was declared.

Before the second trial, DuPont settled with the state for an estimated $12 million. The deal called for contributions of $1 million to Brown University Medical School and $2.5 million to the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center in Boston. Last winter, another $1.2 million was distributed to local agencies around Rhode Island for training and public education programs on lead poisoning prevention.

At the end of this month, Attorney General Patrick Lynch is expected to advertise for a vendor to manage the biggest component of the settlement — a program to make 600 homes across Rhode Island lead safe. His staff said the challenge is in the details: what homes, where, and owned by whom will get the cleanups.

While the lawsuit against the nation’s paint companies slowly made its way through the courts, the number of children poisoned each year in Rhode Island dropped dramatically.

Some 3,437 had elevated blood lead levels in 1998 — slightly more than 10 percent of children tested. The number dropped to 614 last year – less than 2 percent.

Also since 1999, the state has loaned more than $13 million in state and federal money to homeowners for lead abatement in 1,404 housing units.

The state Department of Health has upgraded its Web site with such listings as town-by-town data on lead poisonings, houses declared unsafe for children because they’ve caused multiple poisonings, properties that caused multiple poisonings and landlords who have gotten two notices of lead violations.

“We are totally ahead of the country because of the educational programs, our laws, and because of the data we collect and the way we use it,” says Magaly Angeloni, manager of the Health Department’s lead program. She thinks the poisonings are declining because of the inspections, the education and the repairs over the years.

“There is more awareness now,” says Angeloni. “People are more careful.”

MacRoy, the Washington, D.C.-based advocate, agrees. “Rhode Island is definitely one of the leaders in addressing the lead problem.”

Rhode Island has one of the highest rates in the country for screening small children, he said, and it is one of the few states with proactive legislation that seeks to reduce the dangers of lead poisoning. The practice that used to be followed in Rhode Island, and still persists elsewhere, was to only inspect housing after children were poisoned. Now all housing with young children must be inspected.

In February 2006, after a four-month trial, the longest civil jury trial in state history, the jury found three companies — Sherwin Williams, NL Industries and Millennium Holdings — created a public nuisance by making and selling their lead pigments many years ago. The jury found in favor of a fourth defendant, Arco.

Superior Court Judge Michael A. Silverstein, who presided over the case for the entire nine years, turned down every objection and motion made by the companies. Under his supervision, the state began preparing a plan for the three defendants to remove their paints from an estimated 240,000 houses throughout the state. The work was estimated to cost several billion dollars. Children’s health advocates were euphoric.

Then came the Supreme Court decision.

The court said in an 81-page opinion that its heart went out to the “children whose lives forever have been changed by the poisonous presence of lead.” But it said it couldn’t provide a remedy that disregarded the law. And its reading of public nuisance law in Rhode Island and elsewhere held that defendants could not be charged with creating a public nuisance if they did not control the product that was causing the harm. The companies relinquished control of the paints when they sold them.

The ruling mirrored the defendants’ arguments throughout the case: landlords and homeowners were responsible for harming Rhode Island’s children, not the companies that made the poisonous paints.

Colon and her family have moved to a rambling five-bed-room brick and stone house in Providence’s North End. There are shade trees in back and a nice lawn for her three sons, and a fourth, foster child James, who will soon be 4.

She now is head of training at CLAP, and she knows how to do a lead inspection. She found lead in the polyurethane on the oak floors. And the paint peeling from outside trim is also lead-based. She’s going to send the kids to stay with relatives this summer and clean up the peeling paint.

She recently sold the house on Winsor Street, and paid back the $45,000 in loans she received to clean up the lead there.

Colon says she can understand the Supreme Court’s rationale for reversing the state’s case.

But she still has trouble accepting why she had to pay so much financially and emotionally after her son got lead poisoning. Governments at every level are paying. Taxpayers are paying.

And the companies walk away “scot free.”

“I was angry and bitter for years,” after Sam was poisoned, Colon said. But she decided she didn’t want to waste her life brooding over what happened in the past.

She finds it satisfying to help others who have been affected by lead poisoning. She has seen a lot of improvements in Rhode Island programs and policies.

“And every day I come home and look at Sam and I know I’m doing the right thing.”

For more information on the Rhode Island Lead Poisoning Program go to http://www. health.ri.gov/lead/index.php.

To contact the Childhood Lead Action Project, call or (401) 785-1310 or go to: www.leadsafekids.org.

The R.I. Housing Resources Commission can be reached at www.hrc.ri.gov.

plord@projo.com