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Florida Investigates Graves at Boys School
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Former Reform School Students Recall Beatings, Sex Assaults
December 10, 2008
By Scott Michels
There are secrets hidden at the
Florida State Reform School.
One day in the late 1950s, Richard
Colon was working in the school's laundry room. After a long
bathroom break, Colon, then a student inmate in his early teens,
said he returned and found the room empty and quiet, except for one
tumble dryer that was running.
A young boy had been shoved into
it, he said.
"I looked around and I thought 'I
could help him, but if I do, what will they do to me?'" he said,
assuming the boy had been forced into the dryer as punishment. "So I
left him. And he died."
"I think about him every day," said
Colon, now 65 and living in Baltimore. "I think to myself, I could
have opened that door and I didn't. That torments me."
Colon says he does not know what
happened to the boy's body or who forced him into the dryer. But he
and a group of men who were students at the school during the 1950s
and 1960s believe his remains may be buried among 32 unmarked graves
recently discovered near the school, where they suspect boys who
were killed at the school were dumped.
Their claims, kept hidden for more
than 50 years, prompted Florida Gov. Charlie Crist on Tuesday to
order the state Department of Law Enforcement to investigate the
four neat rows of white crosses in Marianna near the area where the
once segregated school used to house black inmates.
The men, now in their 60s, call
themselves the "White House Boys," a name taken from the small,
white cinder-block building where they say they were beaten
repeatedly with a leather strap lined with sheet metal. Others say
they were sexually abused while at the school.
"The beatings were ungodly. I
thought they were going to kill me," said Roger Kiser, who said he
was sent to the reform school from an orphanage in late 1958. "They
would beat you for anything."
Officials at the school, now known
as the Arthur Dozier School for Boys, and the state Department of
Juvenile Justice have not disputed that some abuse took place and
recently dedicated a memorial to the White House Boys.
Reform School of Abuse A Department
of Juvenile Justice spokesman said that the department did not hear
about the abuse claims at the White House until last year and that
the school has changed.
"We have zero tolerance for
anything that would hurt a child in our custody," said spokesman
Frank Panela.
Corporal punishment was banned in
reform schools in 1967. But, as late as 1987, the state settled a
lawsuit that claimed officials at Dozier and other reform schools
shackled and hogtied students and kept them in isolation cells as
punishment. The state did not admit any wrongdoing, but agreed to
stop the use of hogtying and isolation cells.
When Robert Straley was sent to the
school in 1963, he said he looked at the sprawling campus with
cottages for the students, large oak trees, a swimming pool and
gymnasium and "thought I was in heaven."
"I didn't know it was a beautiful
hell," he said.
His first night, Straley said he
and four other boys were taken to the White House for talking about
running away. He was whipped 40 times, he said.
Straley, Colon and Kiser said boys
were beaten for smoking, swearing or any number of other
infractions. Kiser said school officials thought one boy was
masturbating under the table in the dining hall. He was taken to the
White House and never seen again, Kiser claims.
The men said they were forced into
a small, dank room and told to lie down on their stomachs on a bed
covered in blood and other bodily fluids and grab the bed's metal
bars. Colon said the boys were told if they yelled or whimpered, the
whipping would start over.
"There were little pieces of lip
and tongue where people were biting themselves trying to control
themselves," said Colon, who was sent to the school in 1957 for
stealing cars.
After one particularly bad beating,
Kiser said he woke up in a school administrator's office. When he
went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, "I screamed as loud
as I could because I couldn't tell who I was."
He said he was beaten so badly that
his underwear was stuck to his buttocks and he had to go to the
infirmary to have pieces removed.
White House Boys Once, Kiser said,
a friend had been taken to the White House. School staff dragged the
boy out of the building and left him on the ground, blood running
out of his nose and mouth, Kiser said.
A group of boys crowded around to
see whether he was all right.
"Roger, would you kiss me?" the boy
asked. "Like when your grandmother kisses you when you were hurt
because she loves you."
Kiser said he bent down on his
knees and kissed the boy's forehead.
The three men said their time at
the school left them angry and emotionally detached as they grew
older. As the years passed, several of the White House Boys found
each other, mostly through the Internet, where some had written
about their experiences. They began advocating for an investigation
into the abuse.
In October, Kiser, Colon, Straley
and several other men returned to the school for a ceremony in which
the White House was officially sealed and shut. They walked through
the building and saw the graveyard.
Kiser's old friends suggested he
light a cigarette, a small act of defiance nearly 50 years after he
left the school.
"I couldn't do it. I was
whispering, I was afraid," he said. "To see those walls and smell
that smell. ... I was still scared to smoke, even at 62 years old."
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet
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