27 possible graves found near the famous Florida Reform School

Workers who were preparing to thoroughly clean a fuel storage site near one of the country's most famous reform schools discovered something much worse than soil pollution: evidence of the possibility of 27 graves "clandestine".

A company hired to evaluate underground storage tanks adjacent to the Dozier School for Boys school in Marianna conducted a series of ground-penetrating radar tests on a plot located just under 500 feet from Dozier's Boot Hill Cemetery. , an infamous youth prison. linked to more than a century of crippling abuse.

A report on the study indicates that there are 27 "anomalies" on the plot consistent with human burials. If the 27 anomalies are, in reality, human remains, the total number of known burials on campus would reach at least 82. Researchers at the University of South Florida who have studied the campus extensively believe that 39, there may have been 100 deaths or more in Dozier since it opened in 1900.

"Unmarked graves are deliberately designed to be hiding places," said Jack Levine, a Florida children's advocate who had voiced his concerns about Dozier while he was a young social worker for the US. State. "What's hidden almost forgives the crime."

Originally called Florida State Reform School, the Dozier was created in 1897 as a progressive alternative to the more brutal methods of confining delinquent, incorrigible and orphaned delinquents. The children "would receive a careful physical, intellectual and moral training" on a bucolic campus surrounded by pines and oaks. From the beginning, it was far from ideal, as visitors met children applauded in irons.

Dozier went through periods of ephemeral reforms followed by sometimes infernal abuse spasms. In 2008, a group consisting mainly of men between the ages of 60 and 70 formed what they called the White House Boys, a group named after a blockhouse building of decrepit and decrepit cinderblock on the campus, called the White House.

This is where the officers took them, they said, to be beaten – sometimes many times – with a leather strap encrusted with metal. The boys would be forced to lie on a filthy camp bed, in a cell that would be stained with blood and bursts of human flesh. Some of the men also reported being taken to a "rape room" where the police had sexually assaulted them. Others say that they were aware of the children who were killed there.

Over time, Dozier became a sort of shorthand for the brutal punishment inflicted on unruly children. A former superintendent said parents across the state would threaten "If you do not behave, we'll send you to Dozier."

The youth camp was closed in 2011, at a time when the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division reported "flagrant and dangerous systemic practices exacerbated by a lack of accountability and control" . staff training and little treatment for young drug addicts or those with mental illness.

In December 2018, Florida ceded the Dozier campus to Jackson County, which many White House Boys strongly opposed. A large number of former elderly inmates now favor the site becoming a memorial or museum.

In a letter to a Jackson County Commissioner, Governor Ron DeSantis said that he had asked the state's environmental regulatory department and other agencies to "define the way forward" from the discovery. "Representatives from these agencies will meet with county officials to understand and address these preliminary findings," he added.

Dozier was in isolation before 1968, as was much of the south, including Jackson's rural county in the Panhandle. It was actually two campuses cut in half by Penn Avenue, one for white children in the south and another – a decidedly lower campus – in the north. The 27 earth disturbances that would be graves were discovered in the African-American sector of the reform school.

Even at its foundation, the black campus was anything but equal. The reports of legislators in 1911 and 1913 described the quarters of the white prisoners as "perfectly guarded", sheltering children "comfortably dressed" and "happy". The Negro school, however, was "more in the nature of a convict camp".

Fifty-five sets of remains have already been found buried in and around Boot Hill burial sites, which contained 31 white PVC pipe crosses in well-ordered rows unrelated to the bodies buried below. Some of the boys died during a fire in 1914. They had been locked in "dark cells" on the third floor of a dormitory when a fire broke out.

The exact number of young people who died that night is unknown, although a team of researchers at the University of South Florida estimates that 10 boys were killed in the fire. The bones of three of the victims of the fire were mixed in seven graves.

But they only represent part of Dozier's deadly drama: USF researchers, authorized by the state to investigate the school's history, estimate that nearly 100 boys have died in the prison of the youth for more than a century. Their stories, like their bones, have been buried for decades. Then, in 2008, a handful of Reform school elders found themselves on the Internet.

The 31 crosses on the site seem to be purely symbolic. "The other graves were outside the forest, including under a causeway, undergrowth and a large mulberry tree," writes the USF forensic archaeologist, Erin Kimmerle, in a statement. report presented in January 2015 to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Kimmerle added: "A significant amount" of waste [both historic and modern] was buried in the area, including a cache of syringes and drug bottles' dating back to the 1980s, the remains of a dog potted in a newly purchased water fountain and many garbage.

Robert Straley, who was beginning to understand what had been inflicted upon him after a breakdown in the alleys of a Super Kmart, was one of the founders of the White House group. He died of pancreatic cancer last July at the age of 71.

"You can never go back to Marianna as a man of your mind," Straley told the Miami Herald in an interview the year before his death. "You can only return as helpless as you were. You may think that you are talking about a human voice. But you really speak with the voice of a little boy. "

And the survivors are aging quickly.

"We are so old. We have lost a lot of people over the past decade, "said Jerry Cooper, who represents Dozier's largest surviving faction, and claims the nickname White House Boys. "Many of us are dying and many of us are very sick. They are not even able to travel. They take what comes. "

"Whenever there is a meeting, we are less and less."