Researchers Probe Horrors Behind Deaths At Florida School For Boys

After 3 years of work at a now closed Florida reform school, researchers have found new evidence of violent abuse and unreported deaths. They have identified more sets of remains in unmarked graves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/us/10dozier.html?_r=0

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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/06/dozier-school-for-boys-abuse-florida-new-allegations

Among the allegations of a group of survivors known as the White House Boys, nicknamed for the building in which they say they suffered the worst abuse, are accounts of youths being beaten unconscious while chained to walls or beds, raped by staff and other students in a basement or simply disappearing after excessive punishments for minor infractions such as smoking or truancy.

The USF report contains details of a six-year-old boy who died after being sent out to work as a houseboy, and a teenager who was found shot to death and covered by a blanket after running away from the school.

“It’s been exciting to get a picture of these children, and their lives, from the science,” Kimmerle said. “[But] it’s sad the way people treated each other. It’s a window on a period of a lot of change from the early [20th] century to the 1960s.”
Exhumed remains identified from graves at notorious Florida school
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The university team has now positively identified five bodies from those recovered, either through DNA or contextual evidence. The latest two are 18-year-old Sam Morgan, who spent at least two spells at the school following his first arrival in September 1915, and Bennett Evans, an adult school employee believed to have died in a dormitory fire in 1914.

Last August, Ovell Krell, the sister of the first victim to be identified, George Owen Smith, who disappeared from the school in 1940 at the age of 14, told the Guardian of her relief at the solving of a 74-year mystery.

“It’s been an emotional journey and now I can finally get some closure, some peace of mind,” she said.

State lawmakers approved grants of almost half a million dollars to fund the USF investigation shortly after the school was closed, for financial reasons, in 2011. A year earlier a report by the Florida department of law enforcement, which recorded only 32 graves, concluded there was insufficient evidence to prove or refute the allegations of physical and sexual abuse.

Kimmerle said that the researchers were working with the Hillsborough County sheriff’s office to find surviving family members of boys who attended the school who could provide DNA samples to match with unidentified remains.

“There is a lot of work left to do, in the field, in the lab and filling in the gaps in the records and archives we have,” she said.