Inquiry Ordered Into School Graves
By Rich Phillips
CNN
MIAMI, Florida (Dec. 10) -- Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has ordered an investigation to determine whether the bodies of 32 students were buried decades ago in shallow graves on the grounds of a former reform school for boys.
The governor's action came at the urging of four former residents of what was known as the Florida School for Boys. The four alleged that students were abused and killed by guards decades ago at the school in Marianna, Florida, just south of the Georgia border.
In a letter Crist asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate the graves and determine whether any crimes were committed.
"Questions remain unanswered as to the identity of the deceased and the origin of these graves," Crist wrote in his letter to the FDLE.
"The main goal is to determine the location of the graves, who owned the property at the time, and determine if any crimes were committed," FDLE spokesman Kristin Perezluha told CNN.
Authorities are only now beginning their investigation, so no one can say for certain who, if anyone, is buried in the 32 graves with the white metal crosses.
Four former residents of the school on Monday asked Crist to launch the investigation. They call themselves the White House Boys after the concrete building, where, they claim, the beatings and torture were carried out.
The White House Boys -- Roger Kiser, Michael McCarthy, Bryant Middleton and Dick Colon -- found each other on the Internet, after Kiser started a Web site. They began to talk about experiences at the reform school and eventually decided to go public, and call for an investigation.
The four believe many of the boys who were sent to the White House were killed and their remains buried on the grounds of what is now known as the Dozier School for Boys.
Reached at his home in the Florida panhandle, Middleton, 64, was told by a CNN producer that the governor ordered the probe.
"My god! That's remarkable. My god! That's all I ever wanted," he said. "That will begin a lot of the healing for those that survived that school."
Some of us will never get over the brutality, the sexual assaults and the fear. But this is a major step in the right direction," he said.
Middleton told CNN he was "an incorrigible youth of 14 or 15" when he was sent to the reform school for breaking and entering. During a 30-minute phone interview, he recounted story after horrific story about his time there.
Middleton said he took six trips to the concrete White House, where he endured brutal beatings. He says boys were regularly struck with a metal-reinforced double strap with a long wooden handle.
"You could hear it coming through the air and when it hit your body, the pain was unbelievable," he recalled.
"They just beat you to the point of unconsciousness, or you could no longer understand what was happening to you."
He recalled another occasion in which he and another boy decided to get drunk. They mixed orange juice with rubbing alcohol. It make Middleton sick and his friend intoxicated. A guard confronted the other boy, and began to treat him roughly, Middleton said.
"He dragged him to the administration building and I never saw him again. He never came back to work or to the cottage," Middleton told CNN. "He literally disappeared off the face of the earth."
Colon, 65, is a successful electrical contractor in Baltimore, Maryland. But in the 1950s, he acknowledged, he was a wayward youth who gritted his teeth through 11 beatings inside the White House.
Colon said he remembers entering the laundry one day, and his life, he said, has never been the same. Inside a large tumble dryer, was a black teen.
The White House boys, who are all white, told CNN that black kids at the school were beaten even more savagely than white kids.
"I said to myself, 'What's going to happen to me, if I take him out?' " he told CNN. He recalled being about 15 feet away from the boy in the dryer. He thought about helping him, but was afraid.
"I said to myself, I can't do it, cause I'm gonna be the next one in the God-d-- dryer if I take him out," he said.
"I turned my back and walked out and it torments me every day of my life."
Colon established an educational trust fund at the same campus, for high academic achievers, today operated by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.
At least one former student says the school was strict but fair.
"They were justified in giving me these paddlings because, hey, I was wrong," Phil Hail of Anniston, Alabama, told The Miami Herald.
Hail remembers going to the white building once for getting low grades in 1957, he told the Herald.
"Was [the school] run with a very strict hand?
Yes, it was ... Were the paddlings very severe? Yes, they were," he said.
Another question no one seems able to answer: Why was there no outcry from the parents of boys who disappeared? Why did no one look for them?
Colon and Middleton say it's a valid question. They firmly believe that bodies will be found, and they will be the bodies of both black and white boys.
"I believe, in my own heart, that there has been a cover-up", said Middleton.
Added Colon, "White, African-American, they're all there ... I believe they will find crushed skulls, and broken bones -- and hopefully, one day, the murderers."
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