More graves may be unearthed at Dozier School for Boys

Source: Orlando Sentinel

More graves may be unearthed at Dozier School for Boys

By Carol Marbin Miller
Miami Herald

April 12, 2019, 6:45 AM

Workers who were preparing for a massive cleanup of a fuel storage site near one of the nation's most notorious reform schools have discovered something far worse than ground pollution: evidence of 27 possible "clandestine" graves. ... A company hired to evaluate underground storage tanks adjacent to the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna performed a series of ground-penetrating radar tests on a parcel a little less than 500 feet from what is called the Boot Hill Cemetery at Dozier, an infamous youth prison west of Tallahassee linked to more than a century of chilling abuse.

A report on the study said there are 27 "anomalies" on the parcel consistent with human burials. If the 27 anomalies are, in fact, human remains, the total number of known burials on the campus would rise to at least 82 -- though University of South Florida researchers who have studied the campus extensively believe there may have been 100 or more deaths at Dozier since its opening in 1900. ... "Unmarked graves, by conscious design, are made to be hiding places," said Jack Levine, a Florida children's advocate who had raised concerns about Dozier when he was a young social worker for the state. "What stays hidden almost forgives the crime."

Originally called the Florida State Reform School, Dozier was established in 1897 as a progressive alternative to the more brutal methods of confining delinquent, incorrigible and orphaned youths. Children would "receive careful, physical, intellectual and moral training" on a bucolic campus ringed with pines and oak. It fell far short of that ideal almost from the beginning, as visitors encountered children chained in irons.
....

Fifty-five sets of remains already were found buried in what is commonly called Boot Hill Cemetery, which held 31 white PVC pipe crosses in neat rows that bore no relation to the bodies interred below. Some of the boys perished during a fire in 1914. They had been confined in "dark cells" in the basement of a dormitory when a fire erupted. ... But they are only a part of Dozier's deadly drama: The USF researchers, given permission by the state to document the school's history, estimates that nearly 100 boys died at the youth prison during more than a century of its operation.

Copyright 2019, Orlando Sentinel

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