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32 graves at centre of investigation into Florida reform school

AN investigation has been opened into 32 anonymous graves at a Florida reform school after claims that young orphans and tearaways were flogged and tortured to death by guards.

Former residents of the Florida School for Boys in Marianna believe that the shallow graves, which date to the 1950s and 1960s, contain the crushed skulls and broken bones of fellow inmates, and that staff meted out brutal punishments to boys as young as 8 for "crimes" such as singing or eating an extra pancake at breakfast.

They have told of being dragged screaming to a whitewashed building in the grounds known as the White House, chained to a bed encrusted with the blood and flesh of previous victims and thrashed so violently with a metal and leather strap that their bloodied underwear was left embedded in their buttocks.

"Just even the slightest frown on your face or the slightest word out of context could cause you to be sent down to the White House and be viciously beaten to the point that you would become unconscious and bleed profusely," said survivor Bryant Middleton, 63.

Dick Colon, 65, recalls looking through the steamed-up window of a tumble-drier in the school laundry one day and seeing a black boy inside, churning round and round. He has been haunted by it for the past five decades. "That particular kid was never seen again," said Mr Colon, who was sent to the juvenile offenders institution in the 1950s.

He added: "I feel guilty. I felt as though I could have walked over there and opened the door and tried to give him some help, but then what the hell was going to happen to me if I did?"

The investigation, ordered by the Governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, is expected to lead to the exhumation of the graves at what is now the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. Most of the staff who worked at the institution during the period in question are now elderly or dead, but "justice always cries out for a conclusion", Mr Crist said.

"If there's an opportunity to find out exactly what happened there, to be able to verify if there were these kinds of horrible atrocities ... we have a duty to do so," he said.

The reform school opened in 1900 and thousands of young offenders passed through its doors over the next 108 years. Many of those who ended up there did so simply because they had run away from home, some to escape domestic abuse.

Roger Kiser was hauled there in 1958, at the age of 12, for trying to escape an orphanage where he had lived since the age of two. He underwent a whipping in the White House that left him mutilated and his face looking like a "monster".

"The men grabbed me and held me to the floor. I was yelling to God to save me, begging for someone, anyone, to help. There was blood all over everything," he recalls. "But it didn't do me any good. God didn't hear me that day. Perhaps he was smart enough not to enter the White House, even to save a child."

Only afterwards was he told the reason that he had been beaten - for saying "s***" when he slipped on the school diving board.

In recent years, Mr Kiser, 62, and three others tracked each other down through the internet and formed a group called the White House Boys to bring their childhood horrors to public attention and hold the state accountable.

"I will never forget for as long as I will live that vicious beating that was done to me without even knowing why. I will never forget the monster I saw in the mirror that day. I will never forget what adults are capable of doing to a child," he says.

"I will never forget that the State of Florida was behind what happened to me and to many, many other boys - just for running away from an abusive orphanage."

Posted by: Eidolon
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Posted in: News on December 11, 2008 @ 12:00 AM

Tags: School

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