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New Use for Boot Camp Rejected: While Officials Disagree on the Use
of the Bay County Boot Camp After it Closes, Others Are Protesting the
Exhumation of Martin Lee Anderson, the 14-year-old Who Died at the Camp
BY MELISSA NELSON
Associated Press
March 8, 2006
PENSACOLA - Bay County commissioners on Tuesday rejected a sheriff's
plan to replace a troubled boot camp where guards were videotaped
kneeing and hitting a boy who later died with at a military-style
academy.
Sheriff Frank McKeithen wanted to open his proposed STAR Academy
after the Bay County Sheriff's Office Boot Camp closes in May. The
academy would have been a voluntary program for at-risk youths.
Mike Nelson, Bay County Commission chairman, said commissioners felt
the academy didn't make financial sense and that it was time for the
county to ''get out of that business.'' Nelson said the sheriff should
instead spend the $280,000 he proposed to spend on the academy to train
boot camp employees to become sheriff's deputies so that they can find
work when the boot camp closes.
McKeithen notified the state's Department of Juvenile Justice last
month that he was ending the county's contract to operate the camp with
the state because of 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson's death.
Anderson died early Jan. 6 at a Pensacola hospital, hours after he
collapsed while doing push-ups, sit-ups, running laps and other
exercises that were part of his admission to the Bay County Sheriff's
Office Boot Camp.
Nelson said Tuesday that he wasn't concerned about the county
commission's liability in the case.
''I don't see how the county had anything to do with it. If this is
going to fall back on anybody, it's going to fall back on the sheriff.
The camp falls under the sheriff's office. He's a separate
constitutional officer,'' Nelson said.
Also Tuesday, Florida civil rights leaders announced a series of
religious services and protests surrounding this week's exhumation of
Anderson's body.
The state NAACP and Benjamin Crump, the family's attorney, said
church leaders in Panama City would hold a community service on Friday,
the day Anderson's body is exhumed for additional medical
investigations.
On Monday, NAACP members throughout Florida plan to protest at the
Hillsborough County Medical Examiner's Office in Tampa, where a second
autopsy of Anderson's body will be conducted.
An autopsy performed by Dr. Charles Siebert, the medical examiner for
Bay County, found Anderson died of hemorrhaging caused by sickle cell
trait, a normally benign blood condition that affects about one in 12
black people. Numerous medical experts have questioned the finding.
A second medical examiner and an independent pathologist will conduct
new autopsies.
Crump and the NAACP have retained Dr. Michael Baden, a former New
York City medical examiner who reviewed medical evidence in the slaying
of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, to review the case.
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