Howard Troxler

March16, 2006

On Jan. 5, you and I roughed up a 14-year-old boy at one of Florida's juvenile boot camps in Panama City.

We held him down, pummeled him, kneed him and punched him, long past the point he showed any ability to resist.

I had him by the arms while you gave him a knee to the back. Then you held him while I gave him some good pokes.

Oh, don't worry, it wasn't dangerous for us. There were plenty of folks around to make sure of that, and only one of him.

The kid was pretty limp by the time we loaded him on the gurney, his arm dangling over the side. It's all on the videotape.

He died the next day.

What? You say you weren't in Panama City on Jan. 5, and you doubt that I was there either?

Okay, then. We hired somebody to do it for us. But we're still responsible.

According to the first autopsy, done in the Panhandle, it wasn't the beating that killed Martin Lee Anderson, but internal bleeding related to sickle cell anemia.

The reaction to the news was kind of weird, like it somehow got the state off the hook.

My reaction to that claim was: So what?

They brought the kid to boot camp. They put him through the exercises. He complained of trouble breathing, according to his mother. He got beat up. The next day he died. Our fault.

Even the first medical examiner, the one who blamed sickle cell, said the boot camp stress could have set off a "cascade of events" leading to his death.

If we beat up somebody with a medical condition, and it sets off a "cascade of events" and he dies, does that make it okay?

If so, then the robber who gives his victim a fatal heart attack is off the hook, too. So is the negligent driver who has the bad luck to hit somebody in fragile health.

What kind of excuse is that? "Sorry, not our fault. We didn't know he was going to have a medical problem at the time we were beating him up."

That was the explanation most favorable to the state. We beat up a kid in boot camp, and it was just bad luck that he happened to die the next day from a sickle cell complication.

Of course, everything since the original autopsy has called that explanation into doubt.

The governor assigned the investigation to Hillsborough County authorities. On Monday, the Hillsborough medical examiner and a team of five pathologists conducted a second autopsy.

It will take weeks for them to decide what did kill Martin Lee Anderson. But after the autopsy, Hillsborough authorities announced what didn't: sickle cell anemia or other natural causes.

Creating juvenile boot camps was a fad, another in a long series of easy answers for Florida. It was one of those things that seemed to be "common sense" - get kids before they're too far in trouble and show them some real discipline. Who needed any data to prove that it worked?

If nothing else, boot camps are emotionally satisfying for society. At last we could get in the face of these kids and scream at them. Make them do pushups and run laps.

As to whether the camps actually do any good, who knows? The sheriff of Pinellas County, Jim Coats, recently decided to find out for himself - and found that nine of 10 kids who attended his camp from 1993 to 2005 ended up getting arrested again eventually. In contrast, a camp in Martin County boasts a success rate of 80 percent.

The boot camp where this death occurred has been closed, and officials are proposing new policies for the rest. (Apparently the old policies were judged to be fine until somebody actually died from them.)

Martin Lee Anderson was in boot camp because he had violated a curfew. He was on probation for taking his grandmother's car. He was 14 years old.