Grim search for remains at ex-Florida reform school ends for now - Yahoo! News

UPDATE::  Researchers to look for more graves at Florida reform school

A former Florida Panhandle reform school known for horrific abuse, where the remains of 55 people were unearthed after the state shut its doors, might have more grisly mysteries underneath its grounds.

University of South Florida forensic anthropologist Dr. Erin Kimmerle will be back at the former Dozier School for Boys on Monday, the same place where she spent four years researching and unearthing the remains of boys buried on the massive 1,400-acre site in Marianna, located about 60 miles (96 kilometers) northwest of Tallahassee.

She'll lead a team on a mission to see if 27 anomalies discovered by a contractor using ground-penetrating radar on the site are likely to be human graves.

I first posted about this back in March, work is still continuing at the site,,,

Researchers wound up the first phase of their grim work in the Florida Panhandle on Tuesday, after hunting for the remains of young boys believed to have been secretly buried more than 50 years ago at a notorious reform school.

Erin Kimmerle, a University of South Florida anthropologist who headed the four-day excavation near the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, said the skeletal remains of two youths had been recovered and would undergo DNA analysis.

Ground-penetrating radar has indicated that as many as 50 graves are located in an area outside the now-padlocked school known as "boot hill."

Throughout its 111-year history, the Dozier School was known as a dreaded lock-up for juvenile offenders from across Florida.

Almost 100 detainees were known to have died at or disappeared from the 1,400-acre (566-hectare) institution near the Alabama border - mainly black youths whose families had no way of learning what happened to them in an era of legal racism in the South.

Grim search for remains at ex-Florida reform school ends for now - Yahoo! News

UPDATE::First Remains ID'd From Notorious Florida Reform School

An update to this story from last September:

In December 1940, Owen Smith's mother wrote the superintendent of the then-Florida Industrial School for Boys about the welfare of her 14-year-old son, who had been sent there months earlier for being with a friend in a stolen car.

Frances Smith received a letter from superintendent Millard Davidson that said no one knew where Owen was. A month later, the family was summoned to the Florida Panhandle school and led to an unmarked grave. Owen was in it, they were told — he had escaped and was found dead under a house. Frances Smith never accepted the story. She waited for him to come home.

On Thursday, University of South Florida researchers said they had identified George Owen Smith as the first of 55 bodies they exhumed from the grounds of the renamed Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, an institution with a troubled history where the facilities were often decrepit and guards were accused of brutality. The researchers were unable to determine how Owen died, and they will probably never know.

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Official records showed 31 burials at the Marianna school between its opening in 1900 and its 2011 closure for budget reasons, but researchers found the remains of 24 additional people between last September and December.

First Remains ID'd From Notorious Florida Reform School

Remains of 55 bodies found near former Florida reform school - Yahoo News

Have posted about this case previously, though the body count is twice as high as expected.  (See here and here)

Excavations at a makeshift graveyard near a now-closed reform school in the Florida Panhandle have yielded remains of 55 bodies, almost twice the number official records say are there, the University of South Florida announced on Tuesday.

"This is precisely why excavation was necessary," said USF professor Erin Kimmerle, head of the research project. "The only way to truly establish the facts about the deaths and burials at the school is to follow scientific processes."

On a hillside in the rolling, tall-pine forests near the Alabama-Georgia border, a team of more than 50 searchers from nine agencies last year dug up the graves to check out local legends and family tales of boys, mostly black, who died or disappeared without explanation from the Dozier School for Boys early in the last century.

The school, infamous for accounts of brutality told by former inmates, was closed by the state in 2011.

The University of South Florida was commissioned to look into deaths at the school in the Panhandle city of Marianna, after the Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced the presence of 31 official grave sites in 2010.

Remains of 55 bodies found near former Florida reform school - Yahoo News

'A concentration camp for little boys': Dark secrets unearthed in KKK county - Americas - World - The Independent

That the Arthur G Dozier School – a borstal for delinquent boys founded in 1900 – was not a gentle place was well-established. Boys as young as six were chained to walls, lashings with a leather strap were frequent and, in the early decades, children endured enforced labour, making bricks and working printing presses. When it was closed in 2011, it had already been the subject of separate federal and state investigations.

But, as suspicions deepen about how the boys in the burial ground died, pressure is growing again on the state to shine new light into the darkest days of the school in Marianna, a Florida Panhandle town that once was a bastion of the KKK and the site of the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal. The pressure is coming from some of the school's survivors, from relatives of boys who died here, and from Florida's top US Senator, Bill Nelson.

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So far, the team, led by Erin Kimmerle, has focused its work around the once-secret cemetery. It knows that as many as 98 boys died at the school between 1914 and 1973. Since starting last year, Professor Kimmerle has found 19 previously undiscovered graves in addition to the 31 marked by steel-pipe crosses. That means 50 graves so far. Forty-eight have yet to be located, assuming graves were dug for each body.

"It's more than we anticipated," she says. "Our purpose is to explain who these children were, what happened to them and to understand what the story is that should be told." The official stance – that all the children died from accidents, such as fires and drownings, or natural causes – does not impress her. She cites the case of one child, Billy Jackson, whose cause of death was listed as kidney failure. There is a record of his being beaten two weeks earlier and admitted to hospital. "Common sense", she asserts, says he died from the beating.

The place of Dozier in Florida's history is already set and it's a shameful one. That is thanks in part to a group of Dozier survivors who call themselves the "White House Boys" because that was the colour of the small building where the floggings used to take place. A decade ago, they began finding one another by email and social networks and sharing their painful memories. In a book that Roger Dean Kiser eventually wrote about his time at the school – The White House Boys: an American Tragedy – he called it a "concentration camp for little boys".


'A concentration camp for little boys': Dark secrets unearthed in KKK county - Americas - World - The Independent