Jerry Lantz remembers when he was 15 years old, lifting his father’s thin, sick body up the stairs to the bathroom. A year later, Lantz’s tennis coach cornered him and told him that his father had committed suicide, ending eight years of severe pain.

"I never really got to enjoy my dad," said Lantz, who is seeking compensation from the U.S. Department of Energy for illnesses he and his family claim they have suffered as the result of exposure to radiation.

Marion Lantz, Jerry Lantz’s father, was a machinist at Los Alamos and Sandia Nuclear laboratories in New Mexico for 18 years. While at Los Alamos, Marion Lantz worked on the Manhattan Project, which was responsible for creating the atomic bomb used in World War II.

His father also witnessed atomic bomb testing at Yucca Flats, near Las Vegas, and was given several military awards for war construction projects in 1945.

According to Jerry Lantz, his father was diagnosed with leukemia after witnessing testing of the atomic bomb at Yucca Flats, and could have been exposed to radiation while working at Los Alamos. Lantz’s father was granted a medical transfer to Sandia laboratory when he developed calcium on his spine. Despite the fact that he could not walk and was home sick a lot of the time, he was still kept on the payroll at Los Alamos throughout the time he was ill.

"They were just, in my mind, watching him - waiting to see when he was going to die or what was going on," said Jerry Lantz.

The family moved to Los Alamos in October of 1943. Jerry Lantz was born there, and moved with his family to Albuquerque in 1948. After the move, his mother developed numerous skin growths, and his sister has had two types of cancer.

Lantz, now 56, has had more than 200 polyps removed from his intestines, and 37 surgeries on his colon, large intestine, and knees, but said that he will never forget the day he started getting sick.

"I was standing at the door of the theater and I just told my sister , ‘everything is getting black.’ Next thing I woke up on the couch and one of the employees was holding smelling salts under my nose and I started hemorrhaging," Lantz said. "I had all these polyps [pre-cancerous tumors]. I guess I was born with them."

But other than his father’s basic medical coverage, Lantz said the U.S. government has not compensated or apologized to his family for the pain and suffering they have endured. Lantz said his father was "a guinea pig" for the laboratories.

"They [the laboratories] were very good to him [while he was sick], but they were just watching him rot away," said Lantz. "I haven’t heard one word from the government."

The Lantz’s may finally receive some money, however, if legislation to compensate energy employees makes it through Congress.

The Senate recently passed the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act, an initiative backed by the Clinton administration. Colorado’s two senators — Wayne Allard and Ben Nighthorse Campbell — both voted in favor of the amendment, which passed by a vote of 95-3.

The amendment was tacked onto the FY2001 Department of Defense Authorization Bill, legislation that was developed by the Clinton Administration.

"This is a historic opportunity for Congress to do the right thing and act quickly on the proposal that this Administration initiated last year," Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said in a news release. "...thousands of brave men and women whose work for our country’s defense has left them sick or dying and put their families’ life savings at stake. These people deserve no less."

According to April Kaufman, spokeswoman for the Energy Department, employees working at Los Alamos in the 1940s were previously not eligible for federal workmen’s compensation because they were not federal employees and were hired on a contract basis. Most of them were also not eligible for state workers’ compensation, since cancer and radiation sickness were not covered under those plans at the time.

The Senate’s bill would provide either lost wages and medical care to a sick employee or his or her survivors, or a lump-sum payment of $200,000 plus medical care. Compensation is available for workers who have developed beryllium disease, silicosis, and who may have been exposed to other toxic diseases.

Lantz and his family will have to present their cases to a review board established by the Department of Health and Human Services to determine whether the dose of radiation they might have been exposed to was strong enough to cause the illness.