Teen's death inspires
students
Group is protesting officials' handling of
boot-camp case
By Julian Pecquet
May 30, 2006
A
group of college students from Tallahassee plans to continue calling
for justice in the Martin Lee Anderson case during the summer break.
The students from Tallahassee
Community College and Florida State and Florida A&M universities
have been galvanized by the death of Anderson, black teenager who
died in January a day after being restrained, hit and kneed at a Bay
County boot camp.
"We're just working throughout the
summer to make sure it stays at the forefront of the media," said
Phillip Agnew, the Florida A&M student body president-elect.
Last month, the students staged a
sit-in and rally at the Capitol to protest what they called Gov. Jeb
Bush's lack of action. No arrests have been made, but the case is
still under investigation.
The students will continue their
efforts Saturday when they join the Florida state conference of the
NAACP for a march and rally in Panama City. On May 15, they flooded
the Bay County Sheriff's Office with calls asking for the former
supervisor of the boot camp to be fired. And in recent weeks, the
students have raised money for trips to Panama City and elsewhere.
They've also formed the Student
Coalition for Justice Inc., which is expected to have a Web site by
the end of the week. Its presiding officers are Agnew, FSU student
Cindy Motta and Danyell Shackleford, a former student body president
at TCC.
"We had a car wash last week, trying
to raise money the old-fashioned way," Agnew said Friday. "If we're
going to take a long trip to Washington, D.C., we want to have money
stored up. Hopefully, it won't get to that."
Last week, the students traveled to
Tampa for a quarterly meeting of the state Medical Examiners
Commission. They held a news conference with black legislators
before heading to the commission meeting to share their concerns
about the case.
An initial autopsy report said
Anderson, 14, died of sickle-cell trait, a blood disorder, but a
second one found that he died as a result of the guards' actions
because they covered his mouth and forced ammonia in his nose.
Anderson's parents have called for the arrest of Dr. Charles
Siebert, the Bay County medical examiner who performed the first
autopsy. Shackleford said the medical examiners' meeting was
finished by the time the students arrived. She described half-empty
paper cups and coats and jackets strewn about as if everyone had
suddenly left.
"We felt like it was a blatant
attempt not to listen to what concerned citizens had to say," she
said. "It just seemed outward cowardly."
But Siebert, who was at the 1-hour,
15-minute meeting, told another story.
"It was in fact a short meeting, but
that's because there was nothing much on the agenda," he said. "It
wasn't adjourned prematurely or anything like that."
He said that the Anderson case wasn't
talked about and that the medical examiners did not bring up the
press conference.
Agnew said the students would make
sure to keep the spotlight on the Anderson case as Tallahassee
commemorates the 50th anniversary of its bus boycott and
civil-rights movement.
"I think students are tired of
reading about history and want to be a part of it," he said. "This
is a perfect opportunity to do that."
Contact
reporter Julian Pecquet at (850) 599-2307 or
jjpecquet@tallahassee.com.
Originally
published May 30, 2006
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