President May Have Worn Defective Vest;Body armor company under investigation;

NBC News via MSNBC ^ | September 26, 2005 | Lisa Myers & the NBC Investigative Unit

[John W]

WASHINGTON - May 2002: President Bush attends a memorial for police officers killed in the line of duty. Under his jacket, he's wearing a Second Chance bulletproof vest, according to a company insider critical of the vest.

A year later, a California police officer wearing the same model vest is killed when a bullet penetrates his vest.

Sources involved in the case say the Justice Department now is conducting a criminal investigation into whether the company — Second Chance Body Armor — knowingly sold defective vests to the Secret Service, military and police. The company denies the allegation.

"It means that they put the president of the United States at risk, the first lady at risk, the Secret Service agents that were protecting him at risk," says Steve Kohn, who is representing the company whistleblower in the case.

A company whistleblower says the Secret Service bought possibly defective vests for the president, his detail and others. Another worker told NBC News her group made vests specifically for the president and first lady.

"To find that something could slip through, that possibly would not hold up to the test for which it was designed, it's scary," says Tom Kennedy, a security consultant with Vance International.

[1035rep]

Actually they are more like 2 years late in reporting. NIJ put out a press release 9/03. They initially blamed it on Toyobo the manufacturer of the Zylon fabric but Toyobo said it was the way they weaved the material. Second Chance offered either new panel inserts or a replacement vest at a reduced cost. NIJ has said that a vest that has been modified in any way does not comply with the testing standards of there agency so they had to replace them. Most agencies did not trust to buy from them again which is probably why they are bankrupt.

[claudiustg]

---Very few people are wandering around "with a 44 magnum loaded with 300 (gr) hardcast flat points". ---

You evidently haven't been to western Montana. We have grizzly bears and that's a very common load. 44's are standard equipment up here.

[Gondring]

It seems as though I recall a Darwin Award or some-such going to a guy who broke through a plate glass window and fell several stories to his death after trying to demonstrate the "non-breakable" aspects of his product

IIRC, it was a lawyer, demonstrating the believed strength of the window of his hi-rise office to visiting students. The window wasn't his product. But I want to find more about the (WWII?) story of the mispacked-parachute rate dropping to zero after they started making the packers randomly select a chute and jump with it, every so often.

Westrick urged Davis to "immediately notify our customers of the degradation problems,'' let those with pending orders cancel them and cease all executive bonuses to save money so the company could pay for a replacement initiative, the memo shows.

Now we know why they deny it.

[Gondring]

We have grizzly bears and that's a very common load. 44's are standard equipment up here.

And that load allows you to even have sights on your handgun, right?

[Terabitten]

Second Chance' top of the line body armor a couple of years ago started using a new fabric that was stronger than Kevlar. The material was known to deteriorate after 4 or 5 years and was to be replaced regularly. In use it was found that it deteriorated after less than a year. One police Dept, Baltimore I think, had a number of penetrations. They were suposedly all recalled.

You're close. My job involves body armor for a large federal agency. The new fabric is called Zylon. The problem isn't that it deteriorates after four or five years - all fabric body armor does that. The problem was that it was suspected that Zylon deteriorated at an unpredictable rate. One Zylon vest might be a year old and totally unusable, another might be five years old and perfectly fine. There was no way to tell.

There is some argument that Second Chance may have used a bad manufacture technique, and that is what caused some Zylon vests to fail while others passed the NIJ standard. The bad construction technique would explain what appeared to be unpredictable deterioration, IMHO. If the vest was shot at one spot, it would work. If the vest was shot in another spot (which may only be a millimeter away from the first shot placement), the vest may fail.

[Terabitten]

Should we really know all the details about the President's body armor? I don't think so.

It's common sense, really. The most protection you can get from flexible body armor you can get is called Level IIIA. It's still ridiculously lightweight. There've been huge advances in ballistic armor in the last five years - IIIA vests weigh the same as a IIA (lighter, less protection) did five years ago. It's just common sense that the President would wear a IIIA vest.

Another poster mentioned that it wouldn't stop a .44 mag, or it wouldn't stop rifle rounds. That's true. The only way to stop those rounds is with hard plate.

[Terabitten]

They initially blamed it on Toyobo the manufacturer of the Zylon fabric but Toyobo said it was the way they weaved the material.

There's something to that argument, as well. Toyobo hasn't been sued yet (to the best of my knowledge), and neither has Armor Holdings, or any of the other companies that used Zylon products.

Of course, ABA (part of Armor Holdings) did a better job on their recall, too.

[Servant of the 9]

Thanks. I was just typing off the top of my head. I had gone through all the information a while back when buying a vest fo rmy son, who is a LEO. His dept supplied IIA Kevlar and a lot of officers were buying the Second Chance Zylon that was the same weight and rated IIIA.

So9