Tales of beatings emerging from another FL school for boys near Okeechobee.

I hate to admit that I did not know this one existed. It was opened in 1959, and now is in the hands of private contractors. Investigations there are beginning.

Dozier School for boys in Mariana, FL has finally been closed after years of investigations, nearly 100 years.

Many of the staffers there went to the boys' school in Okeechobee.

Former ‘White House Boy' from Knoxville confronts his past and recalls horrors of Florida reform

At 12 he was beaten so badly by his stepmother Florida authorities removed him from her care. A judge sent the child to a place that sounded like a haven — the new Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee.

There the real hell began. For 10 months, three weeks, four days and some 10 hours, the boy lived in fear. He was beaten, tormented, molested. Struck so often and so hard with a 2 ½-foot-long, 5-inch-wide leather paddle that blood soaked his blue jeans. He got no medical help.

Long after he escaped Okeechobee the emotional and mental pain festered. For years he tried washing out the hurt with alcohol. Eventually he coped by confronting the past and with ongoing therapy and medication. Now the 68-year-old Army veteran and retired truck driver is telling his story. He talks of the abuse, of his helplessness and abiding anger at the men who tormented children. The devout Catholic emphasizes his deliverance from evil, a faith that buoyed his survival and the care from Linda, his wife of 51 years.

Johnson, a Knoxville resident since 1979, is a White House Boy. It’s the name for some 500 men who say they were beaten and abused at two Florida-run reform schools in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sounds like there may be some unmarked graves in Okeechobee near a swamp that might need investigating.

One day at dusk he spotted men dragging a beaten boy from the adjustment center to the rear seat of the school’s 1958 black Ford station wagon. They drove toward the campus tool shed. In a nearby field the next day he saw a freshly dug grave. But the boys were told dairy cows were buried there.