THE CEMETARY IS SURROUNDED BY CHAIN LINK FENCE AND IN DISREPAIR.

Cape Coral survivor of reform school's own 'hell'
Written by Sam Cook
11:03 PM, Dec. 10, 2011
Sam Cook’s column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Call 239-335-0384 or fax 239-334-0708.

When former inmates Roger Kiser and Robert Straley started websites about the mistreatment, it inspired other men who say they also were abused at the now-closed Marianna-based reform school to come forward.

“It was a penal colony for kids,’’ says Orlando-area attorney Gerald Rutberg, 67, who visited the facility. "It's a God-awful, dreadful place."

No one knows the severity of punishment doled out at the Florida School for Boys better than Cooper.

The youthful offender felt the wrath of the whip’s lash too many times.

He knew by the whoosh in the air when the Whipmaster tired of lashing and turned his leather strap into a knife.

“I remember the first cut,’’ says Cooper, 66. “He would turn the strap swing sideways. It would cut you and spatter the walls.’’

The Whipmaster was one-armed Troy Tidwell, the sadistic ringleader of the reform school.

“Tidwell downplayed the beatings,’’ Cooper says. “He called them spankings.’’

Cooper says Tidwell and guard R.W. Hatton administered the licks to more than 300 young inmates in a small white building in Marianna, a town of 6,200 near Interstate 10. Victims of the beatings were nicknamed the White House Boys.

Cooper says he ran away from home three times because he could not get along with his stepdad. The third time he caught a ride with an AWOL Marine in a stolen car. After the Marine tried to rob a vending machine in North Carolina, he rolled the 1959 Chevy convertible with police in pursuit.

“The judge said, ‘Now you got car theft against you,’ but all I knew was the guy’s name: Danny,” Cooper says. “She told me to shut up and sent me to the Florida School for Boys.”

A Cape Coral resident since 1989, Cooper last week revisited his scars.

“There was a boy in the room next to mine,” Cooper says. “He told me: ‘You got 135 lashes.’”

What transgression would possess a guard to whip a teenager 135 times?

He says a runaway in his dorm told guards Cooper knew of the escape attempt.

Cooper was aghast. The teacher’s assistant had a perfect record at the school and was two months from being released.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” Cooper says. “The guards woke me up about 2 a.m. and dragged me to the White House.”

Still, Cooper swore not to go down without a fight.

“As soon as we cleared the room, I struck Tidwell,” Cooper says. “I hit him so hard the back of his head hit the wall. I started beating the hell out of Hatton.

“But Tidwell got me again with that one arm. He stomped on my right foot and broke it. Then he clipped me with the palm of his hand and four teeth folded.”

Cooper says they strapped his legs to the cot and pushed his face into a pillow, which smelled of puke. Then, three guards whaled on him 135 times.

“After 70, I didn’t hear another word out of you, not even a grunt,” the boy next door told Cooper.

Cooper says after 40 licks his butt went numb from the beating.

The unconscious Cooper says he woke up with his throat against the hump in the floor board of a guard’s car. A guard’s foot kept him in place for the ride back to his dorm.

“They took me into the bathroom,” he says. “My nightgown was embedded in my butt and legs.”

Hatton, Cooper’s dorm adviser, flicked a piece of gown out of his bloodied back.

“Holy crap, that’s a good (whipping), ain’t it, buddy?” Hatton told Cooper. “Jerry, I bet you walk a straight line now.”

Cooper, who lathered himself with Vaseline from behind his knees to his lower back, says it took two weeks before he could maneuver comfortably.

Yet the emotional damage was worse. He was left with anger-management issues for life.

His greatest rage is directed toward Tidwell, 86. Cooper says when Tidwell gave a lawsuit deposition about the alleged cruel acts at the White House, he told one lie after another.

Two years ago, White House Boy Cooper found a solution to his frustration and a way to flog the Whipmaster. He took a polygraph test in Tampa to prove his veracity.

“There is no deception indicated,” Mike Alaiwat, polygraph expert, told the St. Petersburg Times. “It appears that Mr. Cooper is being truthful regarding his experience with Mr. Tidwell and other staff in the White House at the Florida School for Boys.”

“I don’t want any money. I’m only in this for one thing,” says Cooper about joining 600 former inmates in a class-action lawsuit against the state and Tidwell. “We knew the statute of limitations had run out. The suit got kicked out, but I would like to cause Tidwell as much trouble in his old age as I can.”

“When I die, I know I’m going to heaven,” he says. “I’ve already spent my time in hell at the Florida School for Boys

CLICK HERE to read the St. Pete Times story about Mr. Cooper taking a lie-detector test.
 
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'White House Boy' tells his story
Submitted by Robert Straley 
By TONY HOLT | Hernando Today
Published: December 18, 2011
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Robert Straley, 65, is one of the "White House Boys," a group of men who said they were terrorized and abused repeatedly by guards at a reform school for troubled teens. He had run away from home four times and each time his penalty was state confinement.
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Jumping over a fence at his fourth youth facility convinced the state he needed more discipline. It would be his last escape. The people who controlled him the next time knew how to extinguish the allure of running away. They knew how to invoke pain and fear and would regularly do so — even to those who walked the straight line.

It was state-funded abuse. It went on for 100 years, said Robert Straley.

"They were so sadistic," he said. "They heard those screams and they seemed to be into that."

Amazingly to him and to the hundreds of other boys who were terrorized, Dozier wasn't so clandestine. Those who lived in the town of Marianna, where the Arthur G. Dozier School was located, knew what was going on within the "140 acres of hell," said Straley.

Either they didn't speak out because they or their family members worked there, or because they feared the consequences, he said.

"There was a great deal of money tied up there," said Straley. "If you lived in Marianna, you dared not talk about that place or what was going on with those boys. Your barn would burn or your cattle would get poisoned … or a stray hunter's bullet would enter your head."

Straley's story has been corroborated by hundreds of others. Dozier was renamed to North Florida Youth Development Center before it was finally shut down within the past year.

In 2008, he and others who were once housed there filed a lawsuit. One of the guards who administered some of the worst abuse is still alive, Straley said. His name is Troy Tidwell. Investigations at the state and federal level are underway.

Straley, now 65 and living in Clearwater, said Tidwell's defense is being paid for by the State of Florida.

Straley gets interviewed often, sometimes in front of the camera. He's been quoted in several major news outlets in Florida and beyond. It's become a nationwide story.

Another former Dozier resident, Jerry Cooper, visited the Eckerd youth camp near Brooksville last week and spoke briefly about his experiences. He said he once sustained more than 130 lashes at one time — from the same man who whipped Straley.

He told the boys at Eckerd they were lucky to have not lived through a similar situation, but warned them about what could happen to them next if they continued to disregard authority and the law.

Cooper doesn't trust any detention facility in Florida. Monitoring those places, he said, has never been a priority for the state.

Straley said it is likely Hernando County has many men who used to live at Dozier and who experienced the same horrors as him and Cooper.

Straley was 16 years old when he was brought to Dozier in 1963. He barely weighed more than 100 pounds.

His first day at Dozier was a surprise to him. There were no fences. It appeared peaceful and wide open.

"The cottages were made of brick," he said. "There was foliage and big pine trees. It was a beautiful, beautiful place."

That night he received his first whipping by the one-armed Tidwell.

Some of the other new boys were talking about running away. Straley took one look at the blissful surroundings and decided he would stick it out. It couldn't possibly be such a bad place, he thought.

"I just wanted to be somewhere away from my parents," Straley said.

The guards there took him to the darkest place of his life.

Presumably because they thought Straley was a flight risk, or they suspected he was among those plotting an escape, the guards led him and four other boys to a white house on the property.

One-by-one, they were lined up against the wall. The first one went inside and the others listened to the sound of leather pounding against flesh — along with the accompanying grunts and screams.

Straley went last.

"That's the worst place to be," he said. "You want to be in there first. Otherwise you hear them screaming and crying. The boys would come out with their hands on their crotches and their eyes were glazed."

On the inside, the white house was a "blood-splattered shed," said Straley. The boys weren't allowed to scream, yell or look behind. All they could do was stay still — and cry.

He did all he could to avoid further corporal punishment. The age range in the school was 14 to 17, but the smallest and most defenseless-looking boys were subjected to the worst treatment, Straley said.

Someone weighing 105 pounds soaking wet had no chance.

Straley said he didn't smoke while he was there, but those who doled out the discipline claimed he did. He was escorted inside the small white house again in the middle of the night and lashed 25 times.

"They could beat you at any time," he said.

Straley's memories of his experiences were buried for 40 years. They resurfaced and his life changed, he said. It's been cathartic for him to speak out, but sometimes his eyes still get moist when he tells the story.

Now he is one of many "White House Boys," a group of activists who are speaking up about the abuses they were forced to endure.

Many of them are hardened military veterans, police officers and successful businessmen. They picked up the pieces.

Others weren't so lucky.

Straley said there were more than 30 unmarked gravesites at the facility while he was there. The brutality in the early part of the 20th century was worse than what he went through.

He is still waiting for a thorough investigation. He is still waiting for Tidwell to receive what he thinks is owed to him.

"Why did the government do nothing about it? That's something we'll never know," Straley said.

When the announcement came that Dozier was closing, he thought state officials glossed over the real reasons for it.

"They can say budget cuts all day long," said Straley, "but we know the truth."

wholt@hernandotoday.com (352) 544-5283

PROPERTY FIGHT

Area governments want state to give them control of Dozier

Marianna City Commissioners voted Tuesday night to ask the state of Florida for vehicles and recreational equipment used at the old Dozier School for Boys.

By: Deborah Buckhalter
Published: August 04, 2011

Representatives of the Marianna City Commission, Jackson County Commission, Jackson County School Board and Jackson County Development Council and others have been meeting periodically and talking with legislative leaders in an effort to bring the old Dozier School for Boys property under local governmental control. The entire complex-including 900 acres in planted pines and the additional juvenile facility that was build several years ago as an adjunct to the original Dozier facility-comes to about 1,300 acres.

The Development Council put the task group together as Dozier closed a few weeks ago. According to Council Executive Director Bill Stanton, the group ultimately hopes that the state will turn the property over with little expense to the local community. Stanton said they are talking with legislators in an effort to have the state “take a sympathetic view” in light of all the job losses here in the past few years. Dozier’s closure put more than 125 people out of work, but earlier downsizing in the past three to five years displace many other workers as well.

No concrete plans have been made for the use of the property, should it come under local control, Stanton said, but many scenarios have been informally discussed. It’s too early, he said, to predict how it might eventually be used but that it might serve several functions.

For instance, Jackson County School Superintendent Lee Miller visited the Dozier campus recently to see whether some of the buildings would be suitable for the school district’s use.

He determined that they might serve as a new home for the Jackson Alternative School. The current Jackson Alternative campus is itself a former Dozier holding, but older and smaller than the ones Miller visited. The Alternative school is located near the Jackson County jail off Penn Avenue, essentially across the road from the part of the Dozier campus Miller looked at as a possible new place for the school.

Miller said that the school system would likely be willing to give up its interests in the current Alternative school campus if a deal is worked out for local government to take the Dozier property over, and if the school board were to take control of the area he has in mind. The city or some other public entity, he said, might then be able to make use of the property that the Alternative school would vacate.

He said the old Dozier gymnasium and ball fields might also be of use for Marianna Middle School sports, since MMS sits very near the Dozier campus. Additionally, he said, the Dozier maintenance department could possibly replace the portables that serve as maintenance headquarters for the Alternative school as it now exists.

“The Dozier school on the other side of the road is a newer, bigger school that Jackson Alternative and it’s laid out just like a regular school. It has a media enter and a place for vocational classes in the back, so there are a lot of possibilities over there for us,” Miller said. “If the decision was made that we could move over there, then we could give up our interests on the west side to the city, the county, or whoever could use that,” he said. “We’re mighty agreeable to some kind of arrangement that would be of benefit to everybody. We’d like to partner and work with them.”

In the meantime, Marianna City Commissioners voted Tuesday to ask the state for several vehicles and some recreational equipment that were being used at the old Dozier school.

The board had planned only to ask for the vehicles, but added other equipment to the list at the request of the Rev. Ronald Dale Miser, pastor of St. James AME Church on Orange Street.

Miser wants the equipment for the McLane Center, a city-owned community recreation center in the vicinity of the church.

Florida closing notorious reform school
'The White House Boys' say good riddance.


Florida closing notorious reform school 'The White House Boys' say good riddance.
Posted: May 26, 2011 - 2:09pm By Jim Schoettler

The controversial reform school where a group of former students known as “The White House Boys” claimed they were abused will close at the end of June.

Closing the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys — or the North Florida Youth Development Center, as the state prefers to call it — will reduce spending by about $14.3 million, said Department of Juvenile Justice spokesman C.J. Drake. There are 185 people employed there.

Not only were boys incarcerated at the Florida School for Boys (FSB) beaten and sexually assaulted, some were used as guinea pigs for doctors, according to claims made by former FSB students.

According to men who were in the reform school at Marianna, a resident psychiatrist there, Dr. Luis Souza, would give the boys a concoction to drink in order to modify their behavior.

In another instance, boys in Madison Cottage were given “cookies and milk” on Friday nights if they had behaved themselves during the week. The milk, recalls one man, had a strange taste and consistency.

Over 300 men have come forward to talk about the abuse they endured at Marianna in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s; and, at the Okeechobee reform school in the 1960s.

To this day no one knows what was in the drink referred to as “Souza’s Soup” by the boys. But one man is now suffering physical ailments that doctors not only can’t identify, they can’t tell him what’s causing them.

“I’m having skin problems, I have spots that bleed and I have sores in my nose,” said Jimmy Turner, who was sent to the reform school in 1964 when he was 14 years old. “I was given the soup every other week I was in there.”

Mr. Turner, who spent 10 months in the Marianna school, can’t count the number of doctors he’s seen about his ailments, but none have been able to help him.

“I’m on 12 different medicines a day,” said the Vietnam veteran.

One doctor, he continued, believed the skin problems were the result of his exposure to Agent Orange while serving with the U.S. Navy on the Cambodia River. However, tests done at a nearby Veteran’s Administration Hospital determined that Agent Orange was not the cause.

Dr. Souza reportedly believed that behavioral disorders developed when the blood did not carry a sufficient amount of oxygen to blood cells. His ‘soup’ was a mixture of concentrated protein made from red bone marrow, stated an article by Joy Rees Shaw in the St. Petersburg Times.

“He (Souza) believed the potion would cure juvenile delinquency in boys. A lot were given this when sent to isolation after beatings—when they were healing,” said Robert Straley, who was in the Marianna school in 1963 and worked as a hospital boy. “The boys who were given soup said they couldn’t remember what happened—like they were in a fog.” 

When asked, Mr. Turner said he also didn’t know what happened to him after he drank the bitter tasting potion. He does recall going into a small room with Dr. Souza, who would have him drink about 6- to 8-ounces of the liquid and would then attach electrodes to his head.

And, as indicated by Mr. Straley, Mr. Turner was first sent to see Dr. Souza when he was healing from a beating given him when he was “sent down” to The White House. 

“I had a place on the back of my head that was draining—that was from a beating by (Troy) Tidwell,” recalled Mr. Turner, who is now on disability.

Mr. Tidwell, a one-armed man who worked at the school, has been blamed for administering agonizing beatings by several men who were “sent down” while at the school. In 2010 a circuit court judge in Tallahassee dismissed a class action lawsuit filed against Mr. Tidwell by some 300 men who were in the Marianna and Okeechobee schools because the statute of limitations had expired.

While Mr. Straley had no first-hand knowledge of Souza’s Soup, he said it didn’t take him long to learn who Mr. Tidwell was.

“I got a beating my first night there (in Marianna),” said Mr. Straley, who was 13 at the time and weighed just 100 pounds. “Tidwell woke me up in the middle of the night and accused me of smoking. In other words, they just needed some late night entertainment.”

Mr. Turner, who still lives in Marianna, said he was sent to the school for truancy and for fighting.

“He (Souza) would have me lie down on a bed and I believe the soup made me go to sleep,” he said, in a recent telephone interview. “I don’t remember if it made me feel different. It was supposed to help me—to keep from being so mean and getting into trouble and stuff. But, it didn’t help me.”

As for Bryant Middleton, he still wonders where an alleged doctor got the cookies and milk that he gave to boys in Madison Cottage. During his incarceration at Marianna, the retired U.S. Army captain was in Madison Cottage and remembers being given the suspicious treat.

Capt. Middleton said he and the other boys in his cottage were given the Friday night ‘treats’ by Dr. Robert Curry, who was doing a behavioral study on the boys. If a boy had received an infraction during the week, he did not get the treat but, instead, had to set at the same table and watch the other boys so Dr. Curry could watch his reactions.

He’s also become very curious on just where Dr. Curry, a purported psychologist, got the milk and cookies.

“Every time I was fortunate enough to get cookies and milk, I know it had a strange taste or texture that was different from normal milk,” recalled Capt. Middleton. “I was the pantry boy and totally accountable for dry goods and refrigerated items, and I never gave out any bottles of milk. I had the only set of keys. I went to the kitchen at 4:30 a.m. and I never issued it.
After having their cookies and milk, Capt. Middleton said the boys were told to take showers then were sent to bed. Looking back, he thinks the treats were given to the boys to induce sleep. However, he’s not sure of that.

One thing he is sure of, Dr. Curry was not a doctor. The man, he continued, did not have a medical degree and was of questionable character.

“He went to a junior college and got an associates degree in social work, but he deceived the state into believing he was a board certified psychologist,” said Capt. Middleton. “He would come down to the showers and watch the boys. He would call us out of the showers, when we were nude, and look at us. He also liked to run his fingers through our hair, touch us on our shoulders and say suggestive things.”

According to Capt. Middleton, Souza not only doled out his infamous soup but would also give boys antipsychotic medication and would conduct shock therapy on boys in Pearce Cottage. The medications, he continued, changed the behavioral actions and outbursts the boys were having.

“You could hear the blood curdling screams coming out of that place at night,” recalled Capt. Middleton.

He said Dr. Souza started his experiments when he returned from Germany.

When asked if Souza’s Soup was ever given to the boys housed at the FSB in Okeechobee, Capt. Middleton said he didn’t know but it seemed plausible.

“I don’t know if it was done in Okeechobee,” said Mr. Straley, “but they sent Tidwell and (Frank) Zych to Okeechobee to ‘straighten the mess out.’ I guess they straightened them out. Zych stayed, but Tidwell returned to Marianna.”

Mr. Zych, who has since died, later became the superintendent at the Okeechobee school.

Mr. Turner said he will soon be leaving Florida to see even more doctors in hopes of finding something that will relieve his suffering. If the doctors only knew what was in that yellowish drink besides dark flakes, he thought out loud.

“I just wish they could trace back to see what that rascal was putting in that soup,” he said.

****************
Horrific US Medical Experiments Come to Light Feb 27, 2011 – 1:04 PM // Mike Stobbe //  AP (Associated Press)

ATLANTA -- Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on  disabled people and prison inmates.
Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

 U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States - studies that often involved making healthy people sick.

AP PHOTO 
 
In this June 25, 1945 photo, a doctor exposes a patient to malaria-carrying mosquitoes at Stateville Penitentiary in Crest Hill, Ill. A series of malaria studies at Stateville and two other prisons were designed to test antimalarial drugs that could have helped soldiers fighting in the Pacific during World War II.

An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn't give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

These studies were worse in at least one respect - they violated the concept of "first do no harm," a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.

"When you give somebody a disease - even by the standards of their time - you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the '60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.

Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society - people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.

"There was definitely a sense - that we don't have today - that sacrifice for the nation was important," said Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society, who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments.

The AP review of past research found:

-A federally funded study begun in 1942 injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at a state insane asylum in Ypsilanti, Mich., then exposed them to flu several months later. It was co-authored by Dr. Jonas Salk, who a decade later would become famous as inventor of the polio vaccine.

Some of the men weren't able to describe their symptoms, raising serious questions about how well they understood what was being done to them. One newspaper account mentioned the test subjects were "senile and debilitated." Then it quickly moved on to the promising results.

-In federally funded studies in the 1940s, noted researcher Dr. W. Paul Havens Jr. exposed men to hepatitis in a series of experiments, including one using patients from mental institutions in Middletown and Norwich, Conn. Havens, a World Health Organization expert on viral diseases, was one of the first scientists to differentiate types of hepatitis and their causes.

A search of various news archives found no mention of the mental patients study, which made eight healthy men ill but broke no new ground in understanding the disease.

-Researchers in the mid-1940s studied the transmission of a deadly stomach bug by having young men swallow unfiltered stool suspension. The study was conducted at the New York State Vocational Institution, a reformatory prison in West Coxsackie. The point was to see how well the disease spread that way as compared to spraying the germs and having test subjects breathe it. Swallowing it was a more effective way to spread the disease, the researchers concluded. The study doesn't explain if the men were rewarded for this awful task.

-A University of Minnesota study in the late 1940s injected 11 public service employee volunteers with malaria, then starved them for five days. Some were also subjected to hard labor, and those men lost an average of 14 pounds. They were treated for malarial fevers with quinine sulfate. One of the authors was Ancel Keys, a noted dietary scientist who developed K-rations for the military and the Mediterranean diet for the public. But a search of various news archives found no mention of the study.

-For a study in 1957, when the Asian flu pandemic was spreading, federal researchers sprayed the virus in the noses of 23 inmates at Patuxent prison in Jessup, Md., to compare their reactions to those of 32 virus-exposed inmates who had been given a new vaccine.

-Government researchers in the 1950s tried to infect about two dozen volunteering prison inmates with gonorrhea using two different methods in an experiment at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The bacteria was pumped directly into the urinary tract through the penis, according to their paper.

The men quickly developed the disease, but the researchers noted this method wasn't comparable to how men normally got infected - by having sex with an infected partner. The men were later treated with antibiotics. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but there was no mention of it in various news archives.

Though people in the studies were usually described as volunteers, historians and ethicists have questioned how well these people understood what was to be done to them and why, or whether they were coerced.

Prisoners have long been victimized for the sake of science. In 1915, the U.S. government's Dr. Joseph Goldberger - today remembered as a public health hero - recruited Mississippi inmates to go on special rations to prove his theory that the painful illness pellagra was caused by a dietary deficiency. (The men were offered pardons for their participation.)

But studies using prisoners were uncommon in the first few decades of the 20th century, and usually performed by researchers considered eccentric even by the standards of the day. One was Dr. L.L. Stanley, resident physician at San Quentin prison in California, who around 1920 attempted to treat older, "devitalized men" by implanting in them testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts.

Newspapers wrote about Stanley's experiments, but the lack of outrage is striking.

"Enter San Quentin penitentiary in the role of the Fountain of Youth - an institution where the years are made to roll back for men of failing mentality and vitality and where the spring is restored to the step, wit to the brain, vigor to the muscles and ambition to the spirit. All this has been done, is being done ... by a surgeon with a scalpel," began one rosy report published in November 1919 in The Washington Post.

Around the time of World War II, prisoners were enlisted to help the war effort by taking part in studies that could help the troops. For example, a series of malaria studies at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois and two other prisons was designed to test antimalarial drugs that could help soldiers fighting in the Pacific.

It was at about this time that prosecution of Nazi doctors in 1947 led to the "Nuremberg Code," a set of international rules to protect human test subjects. Many U.S. doctors essentially ignored them, arguing that they applied to Nazi atrocities - not to American medicine.

The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs.

But two studies in the 1960s proved to be turning points in the public's attitude toward the way test subjects were treated.

The first came to light in 1963. Researchers injected cancer cells into 19 old and debilitated patients at a Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in the New York borough of Brooklyn to see if their bodies would reject them.

The hospital director said the patients were not told they were being injected with cancer cells because there was no need - the cells were deemed harmless. But the experiment upset a lawyer named William Hyman who sat on the hospital's board of directors. The state investigated, and the hospital ultimately said any such experiments would require the patient's written consent.

At nearby Staten Island, from 1963 to 1966, a controversial medical study was conducted at the Willowbrook State School for children with mental retardation. The children were intentionally given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured with gamma globulin.

Those two studies - along with the Tuskegee experiment revealed in 1972 - proved to be a "holy trinity" that sparked extensive and critical media coverage and public disgust, said Susan Reverby, the Wellesley College historian who first discovered records of the syphilis study in Guatemala.

By the early 1970s, even experiments involving prisoners were considered scandalous. In widely covered congressional hearings in 1973, pharmaceutical industry officials acknowledged they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia made extensive use of inmates for medical experiments. Some of the victims are still around to talk about it. Edward "Yusef" Anthony, featured in a book about the studies, says he agreed to have a layer of skin peeled off his back, which was coated with searing chemicals to test a drug. He did that for money to buy cigarettes in prison.

"I said 'Oh my God, my back is on fire! Take this ... off me!'" Anthony said in an interview with The Associated Press, as he recalled the beginning of weeks of intense itching and agonizing pain.

The government responded with reforms. Among them: The U.S. Bureau of Prisons in the mid-1970s effectively excluded all research by drug companies and other outside agencies within federal prisons.

As the supply of prisoners and mental patients dried up, researchers looked to other countries.

It made sense. Clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules. And it was easy to find patients who were taking no medication, a factor that can complicate tests of other drugs.

Additional sets of ethical guidelines have been enacted, and few believe that another Guatemala study could happen today. "It's not that we're out infecting anybody with things," Caplan said.

Still, in the last 15 years, two international studies sparked outrage.

One was likened to Tuskegee. U.S.-funded doctors failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study in Uganda even though it would have protected their newborns. U.S. health officials argued the study would answer questions about AZT's use in the developing world.

The other study, by Pfizer Inc., gave an antibiotic named Trovan to children with meningitis in Nigeria, although there were doubts about its effectiveness for that disease. Critics blamed the experiment for the deaths of 11 children and the disabling of scores of others. Pfizer settled a lawsuit with Nigerian officials for $75 million but admitted no wrongdoing.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general reported that between 40 and 65 percent of clinical studies of federally regulated medical products were done in other countries in 2008, and that proportion probably has grown. The report also noted that U.S. regulators inspected fewer than 1 percent of foreign clinical trial sites.

Monitoring research is complicated, and rules that are too rigid could slow new drug development. But it's often hard to get information on international trials, sometimes because of missing records and a paucity of audits, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a Duke University professor of medicine who has written on the ethics of international studies.

These issues were still being debated when, last October, the Guatemala study came to light.

In the 1946-48 study, American scientists infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis, apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades

** Webmaster's note.  If you feel you received "experimental treatment" while at FSB or Okeechobee, please email us, or contact the attorneys directly. 

Ben Montgomery, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Tuesday, March 1, 2011 

In Tallahassee Claims bill filed to compensate men

State Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, has filed a claims bill seeking compensation from the state for men who were abused at Florida reform schools in Marianna and Okeechobee in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. The bill is before a special master on claims bills, who will decide whether to forward it to leaders in the House and Senate to be heard during the coming legislative session.

Fasano said he was moved to present the bill after reading newspaper accounts of the physical and sexual abuse the men endured while in state custody and how that trauma shaped their lives.

"You read this stuff and you can't believe this happened in America," Fasano said. "Their story needs to be told and they need to be compensated for what they went through."

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO (INCLUDING PHOTOS AND VIDEO) ON THE PULITZER PRIZE NOMINATED SERIES: FOR THEIR OWN GOOD BY BEN MONTGOMERY AND WAVENEY ANN MOORE -- Times Staff Writers //Photography by EDMUND D. FOUNTAIN

http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2009/reports/dozier

Abuse & State Reform School

Crist, others, bear shame for the white house boys - by Bernie DeCastro, an Ocala resident, and an independent candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010

Silence is a terrible thing. In this case, however, silence speaks volumes about our state’s elected officials, especially Governor Charlie Crist. When most thinking people would expect an official outcry about the inhuman and inhumane conditions at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, all we get from senior elected officials in this state is silence.
The lack of public response by the state’s leadership to media revelations of the horrors at the Dozier School – and the pain and suffering inflicted on boys in its infamous white house – leads one to conclude one of three things about Crist and others in a position to force change, all unflattering: One, they just don’t care; two, they don’t believe the media and eye-witness reports of the shocking conditions at the “school”; or three, the boys are too young to vote and therefore don’t merit attention.  To continue reading, click HERE  

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 BLOG

Joyner files claims bill for White House Boys

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Florida reform school investigation finds no grounds for prosecutions


By Rich Phillips, CNN
March 11, 2010 9:14 p.m. EST

Miami, Florida (CNN) -- Their stories were chilling: Students at a reform school recounted beatings and sexual assaults at the hands of school administrators and other employees who were supposed to be taking care of them.  Click HERE to read the rest of the story and view the photos. 
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FROM WJHG

Posted: 9:27 PM Sep 27, 2011

Jackson County Commission May Buy Some of Dozier's Property
Marianna- The Jackson County Board of Commissioners may vote at Tuesday's meeting to lease or buy some of the Dozier School for Boy's property now for sale.
Reporter: Bryan Anderson
Email Address: Bryan.Anderson@wjhg.com

 County May Buy A Portion Of Former Dozier Property

By: Deborah Buckhalter
Published: August 04, 2011

Representatives of the Marianna City Commission, Jackson County Commission, Jackson County School Board and Jackson County Development Council and others have been meeting periodically and talking with legislative leaders in an effort to bring the old Dozier School for Boys property under local governmental control. The entire complex-including 900 acres in planted pines and the additional juvenile facility that was build several years ago as an adjunct to the original Dozier facility-comes to about 1,300 acres.

The Development Council put the task group together as Dozier closed a few weeks ago. According to Council Executive Director Bill Stanton, the group ultimately hopes that the state will turn the property over with little expense to the local community. Stanton said they are talking with legislators in an effort to have the state “take a sympathetic view” in light of all the job losses here in the past few years. Dozier’s closure put more than 125 people out of work, but earlier downsizing in the past three to five years displace many other workers as well.

No concrete plans have been made for the use of the property, should it come under local control, Stanton said, but many scenarios have been informally discussed. It’s too early, he said, to predict how it might eventually be used but that it might serve several functions.

For instance, Jackson County School Superintendent Lee Miller visited the Dozier campus recently to see whether some of the buildings would be suitable for the school district’s use.

He determined that they might serve as a new home for the Jackson Alternative School. The current Jackson Alternative campus is itself a former Dozier holding, but older and smaller than the ones Miller visited. The Alternative school is located near the Jackson County jail off Penn Avenue, essentially across the road from the part of the Dozier campus Miller looked at as a possible new place for the school.

Miller said that the school system would likely be willing to give up its interests in the current Alternative school campus if a deal is worked out for local government to take the Dozier property over, and if the school board were to take control of the area he has in mind. The city or some other public entity, he said, might then be able to make use of the property that the Alternative school would vacate.

He said the old Dozier gymnasium and ball fields might also be of use for Marianna Middle School sports, since MMS sits very near the Dozier campus. Additionally, he said, the Dozier maintenance department could possibly replace the portables that serve as maintenance headquarters for the Alternative school as it now exists.

“The Dozier school on the other side of the road is a newer, bigger school that Jackson Alternative and it’s laid out just like a regular school. It has a media enter and a place for vocational classes in the back, so there are a lot of possibilities over there for us,” Miller said. “If the decision was made that we could move over there, then we could give up our interests on the west side to the city, the county, or whoever could use that,” he said. “We’re mighty agreeable to some kind of arrangement that would be of benefit to everybody. We’d like to partner and work with them.”

In the meantime, Marianna City Commissioners voted Tuesday to ask the state for several vehicles and some recreational equipment that were being used at the old Dozier school.

The board had planned only to ask for the vehicles, but added other equipment to the list at the request of the Rev. Ronald Dale Miser, pastor of St. James AME Church on Orange Street.

Miser wants the equipment for the McLane Center, a city-owned community recreation center in the vicinity of the church.

Dosed in juvie jail: Troubled doctors hired to treat kids in state custody
 
ByMichael LaForgia
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Posted: 2:06 p.m. Sunday, June 19, 2011

By the time Florida started paying Dr. Gold Smith Dorval to counsel and medicate jailed children, the Pembroke Pines psychiatrist already had experience with kids in state custody.
 
He had used them, authorities said, to bilk the government out of money for the poor.
 
When Dorval pleaded no contest to a felony grand theft charge, it should have barred him, by law, from working for Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice. It didn't.

And, like Dorval, other doctors have emerged from past troubles and gotten jobs at DJJ - with authority to prescribe drugs to kids in state jails, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found.
 
Some psychiatrists took DJJ jobs after they were cited for breaking the law, making grave medical missteps or violating state rules. Others were hired after they were accused of overmedicating patients, sometimes fatally.
 
All were empowered to prescribe drugs to jailed kids as powerful antipsychotic pills flowed freely into Florida's homes for wayward children.
 
"It's appalling. A psychiatrist is a psychiatrist. They're licensed, they've been to medical school, and there is a certain trust placed in that person's judgment when they tell you that this child needs to be medicated," said John Walsh, an attorney with the Palm Beach County Legal Aid Society who has represented children in juvenile court. "This just illustrates that we always have to be on guard with children."
 
In two years, Florida bought hundreds of thousands of tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for children housed in state-run jails and programs. The meds were administered in a juvenile justice system that doesn't track prescriptions and has no way of telling whether doctors are prescribing to make kids easier to control.
 
In some jails and homes, pills were prescribed by psychiatrists who took huge speaker fees from companies that make antipsychotic drugs, The Post found. In others, the task fell to doctors with troubled pasts.
 
In response to the newspaper's first reports, published last month, DJJ Secretary Wansley Walters launched an investigation into the department's use of antipsychotic drugs. DJJ officials declined to discuss The Post's latest findings, citing the probe.
 
Spokesman C.J. Drake acknowledged, though, that the department has struggled to find psychiatrists willing to work in jails and programs. He also said DJJ sometimes has relied on companies that employ a stable of doctors, rather than signing a contract with a single physician.
 
As a result, Dorval went to work in a Broward County jail for children - even though he would have failed a state-mandated background check required by the contract.
 
Doctor's bogus billings

In the late 1990s, Dorval claimed he was providing juvenile delinquents and other vulnerable children with needed therapy. Instead, state investigators said, he used bogus counselors to bill Medicaid for more than $350,000 in fraudulent claims.
 
He charged the government for offering more than 24 hours' worth of children's therapy in a single day, investigators said, and structured the scheme around kids who were homeless or in DJJ custody or foster care.
 
He tended to bill "for those children that the system 'lost,' " according to an affidavit for his arrest.
 
Originally charged with four felonies in Broward, Dorval pleaded no contest to one count of grand theft in 2004.
 
Later, to keep his medical license, he agreed to pay $10,000 and was suspended, reprimanded and put on four years' probation.
 
Although a judge withheld a formal finding of guilt, the plea disqualified Dorval from seeing patients in a juvenile jail. Even so, his employer, Miami-based Compass Health Systems, sent him to work at the Broward Juvenile Detention Center between August and December 2007.
 
No one screened his background beforehand.

In written responses to questions, Dorval said he was doing as he was told when Compass sent him to work in the Broward juvenile jail.
 
"At that period you cited, the psychiatrist that was seeing patients at the DJJ was out. Therefore I was designated by the management office to go and cover for that psychiatrist, until they switched me again to another place. I was not aware of any wrongdoing," wrote Dorval, who stressed that he never signed a contract with DJJ. "I am only an employee. Wherever they send me to work I have to go."
 
As for the criminal charges, he offered this explanation: "This case was a simple matter that became complicated, because my first lawyer messed me up." After wrangling over the facts, "they decided to offer me a plea that would allow me to get a chance to fight for my license to practice medicine," he wrote. "It was a real nightmare that generated in me a post-traumatic syndrome that I will never forget."
 
DJJ officials declined to comment on Dorval's hiring, again citing the investigation.
 
Compass officials didn't respond to questions about Dorval.

DJJ had no contract with Compass as of May, records show.

Patient's death missed in screening

In state-operated jails and programs, the rules say DJJ must screen doctors' backgrounds and verify that physicians' hold valid medical licenses. In privately run programs, which house the majority of children in the department's custody, that responsibility falls to contracted companies.
 
Such screenings don't catch everything: Doctors who kept their licenses after the state accused them of serious lapses have gone on to work in juvenile jails and homes.
 
Dr. Charles J. Dack is an example. For six years, Dack, a Lakeland-based physician who is board-certified in addiction and child psychiatry, prescribed a cocktail of antidepressants and powerful painkillers, including methadone and morphine, to a patient named Mary Tuxbury.
 
Eventually, Dack ramped up the doses of pills Tuxbury was taking, keeping her "at a toxic level of morphine for approximately two and a half years," regulators from the state health department said. In March 2002, Tuxbury was found dead. She was 42.
 
An autopsy showed she died of "multiple drug intoxication, namely opiates and tricyclic antidepressants."
 
Regulators charged Dack with failing to meet care standards and inappropriate prescribing. Dack settled the allegations in August 2007. He admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to pay a $7,000 fine and complete a course on "misprescribing" drugs.
 
A year later, he was hired to care for children at three privately run programs in Central Florida: Wilson Youth Academy, Peace River Youth Academy and New Beginnings Youth Academy. He worked in the homes until April.
 
Dack didn't respond to messages seeking comment.

Doctor hired after child's death
 
Other DJJ doctors weren't cited by regulators, but they were accused in court of fatal neglect. Roughly one in eight of the psychiatrists who have worked for DJJ in the past five years has settled a malpractice lawsuit in Florida, records show.
 
Among these was Dr. Samuel McClure. As a psychiatrist in Orlando, McClure diagnosed an 11-year-old boy named David Morganthal with attention deficit disorder. He prescribed powerful, mind-altering drugs for David - even though the child was much smaller than other kids his age, according to court documents.
 
One morning in November 2001, David's mother woke to find her son dead on the floor of her double-wide mobile home. When they laid David out at the morgue, he measured less than 4-foot-2 and weighed 49 pounds.
 
Lab tests showed his blood contained an unusually high concentration of an antidepressant: about 60 percent more of the medication than doctors had expected.
 
The drug, mirtazapine, still hasn't been approved as safe for children. David was taking the drug along with another antidepressant that hasn't been approved for kids, citalopram.
 
The autopsy concluded the boy probably died from a seizure and heart problems caused by "reaction to prescription medication."
 
In 2004, Patty Morganthal sued McClure, the health care company he worked for and others over the death of her son, alleging medical negligence.
 
While the civil suit still was pending, McClure was hired in January 2006 to care for kids in DJJ's Frances Walker Halfway House and Brevard Group Treatment Home.
 
A year later, records show, McClure's insurance company paid $500,000 to settle Morganthal's case.
 
McClure worked in DJJ programs until June 2009. He couldn't be reached for comment.
 
Overmedicated patients

Still another DJJ doctor got hired after he accidentally overmedicated kids with an antipsychotic drug during a clinical trial.
 
In summer 2006, Dr. Sohail Punjwani of Lauderhill tested the Pfizer drug on seven children between the ages of 10 and 16. Six of those kids were overdosed, according to a 2010 warning letter to Punjwani from the federal Food and Drug Administration.
 
One 13-year-old "was overdosed on study medication for 20 consecutive days," the FDA said, and he emerged experiencing "sedation and dizziness."
 
Eighteen months later, Punjwani, who is board-certified in adult and child psychiatry, went to work in the Broward Juvenile Detention Center, placed there by his employer, Compass. He evaluated kids in the jail until June 2008, records show.
 
Soon after, while working for the state foster care system, he began seeing a difficult patient, 7-year-old Gabriel Myers. Punjwani prescribed mind-altering drugs for the boy, including a combination of an antipsychotic and an antidepressant. In April 2009, Gabriel hanged himself in the shower of his Margate foster home.
 
A work group formed to study the death never assigned blame to Punjwani, and he was not disciplined by state regulators in the widely publicized case.
 
A 2010 report by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, which consulted with a forensic psychiatrist on staff at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, concluded "the medications that were prescribed for Gabriel may have contributed to his actions directly prior to and during" his death.
 
Drug error blamed on nurse

In an interview, Punjwani said Pfizer's 2006 study was flawed, citing a 2010 FDA warning letter to the drug company, and added that his medication errors stemmed from a mistake by a nurse. He acknowledged, though, that he failed to build in a control that would have prevented overdosing.
 
Punjwani said he saw "very few" children at the DJJ jail who were taking mind-altering drugs. For these kids, he simply reviewed their files and maintained them on their meds, he said.
 
And in Gabriel's case, Punjwani said he feels he was a scapegoat.

"My care was totally appropriate and, according to some psychiatrists, went above and beyond the standard of care in the clinical community. Because I saw the patient on time, I had appropriate follow up, I had documentation," he said.
 
The way his critics portray him, "I look like a child killer," he added. "It's sad. I've been in practice in psychiatry for 25 years, a double board-certified child psychiatrist. Of course there are some bad outcomes. But that does not mean malpractice. That does not mean I've been hurting people."
 
Two-hour consultations adequate?

At a minimum, state contracts required these and other doctors to spend two hours a week evaluating jailed children.
 
Every week, in jails and homes that can hold a combined 6,000 boys and girls statewide, children line up to see the psychiatrist.
 
Paul DeMuro, a former head of Pennsylvania's child welfare system, questioned whether two hours was enough to evaluate each child, assess progress and write prescriptions.
 
"If you're looking at two hours of consultation a week, and there are 100 kids, and 20 or 25 are on psychotropic medications, how much attention can they give those kids?" said DeMuro, who works as a consultant for juvenile justice policy-makers nationwide. "What else are they going to do other than push pills?"
 
To View a list of Doctors who have worked for the DJJ, click HERE.

IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS FOR YOU TO READ (CLICK ON THE TITLE OF THE ONE YOU WANT TO SEE - THEY TAKE A LITTLE TIME TO LOAD) :

 
IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS FOR YOU TO READ (CLICK ON THE TITLE OF THE ONE YOU WANT TO SEE - THEY TAKE A LITTLE TIME TO LOAD) :

FLORIDA DEPT OF LAW ENFORCEMENT (FDLE) INVESTIGATIVE SUMMARY REPORT ON UNMARKED GRAVES

FDLE INVESTIGATIVE SUMMARY REPORT ON ABUSE AT DOZIER

FEDERAL DEPT OF JUSTICE INVESTIGATION OF DOZIER - DECEMBER, 2011 (.DOC)

FEDERAL DEPT OF JUSTIC INVESTIGATION OF DOZIER - DECEMBER, 2011 (.PDF)

ROBERT STRALEY'S REBUTTAL TO THE ORIGINAL FDLE REPORT

Failed claims bills revived in Florida Legislature

By BILL KACZOR
Associated Press

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Emotion-packed bills that would compensate two men whose lives were turned upside down by governmental mistakes will get another chance during Florida's 2012 legislative session after the measures died in the frantic final hours of the 2011 session.
 
They are among several high-profile claims bills lawmakers will consider in the session that begins Jan. 10.
 
One measure would benefit Eric Brody, who suffered brain damage and paralysis when he was 18 after a speeding Broward County sheriff's deputy - running late to work - crashed into his car in 1998. He is seeking more than $15 million - under Florida law, a government agency can't pay an individual lawsuit award or claim for more than $200,000 without approval of the Legislature and governor.
 
Another is for William Dillon, who spent 27 years in prison for a Brevard County murder he didn't commit. He is seeking more than $810,000.
 
Both are top priorities for Senate President Mike Haridopolos. The Senate passed each during the final week of the 2011 session in May before going to the House.
 
Brody, who requires a wheelchair and has a severe speech impediment, waited with his parents in the House gallery into the wee hours of the session's last day for a roll call that never happened.
 
"It was like he didn't exist and the bill didn't exist," said Chuck Brody, Eric's father. "We were not told why."
 
Haridopolos, who was near tears after the House adjourned without acting, doesn't want that to happen again. The Merritt Island Republican says he expects the Senate to again pass both bills on the first day of the 60-day 2012 session, and again send them to the House.
 
"We'll give it to them with 59 days to spare so there will be plenty of time if they choose to take them up," Haridopolos said. "My strategy is pretty straightforward. It's the right thing to do."
 
Bills also have been filed for the parents of Florida State University football player Devaughn Darling, who died in February 2001 of apparent cardiac arrhythmia after a workout, and 23-year-old Rachel Hoffman, a recent Florida State graduate who was serving as an undercover informant for Tallahassee police when she was fatally shot during a botched drug sting in 2008.
 
Other measures would compensate parents for the death of Jean A. Pierre Kamel, a 13-year-old Palm Beach County boy who was shot in front of his school by another teen, and Franklin Weekley, whose body was discovered when workers demolished a neighboring building two years after he vanished from a state facility for the mentally handicapped in the Panhandle town of Marianna.
 
Bills also have been filed on behalf of more than 300 men who've alleged they were physically and sexually abused at a Marianna reform school when they were boys, and Brian Pitts, an unpaid lobbyist for a group called Justice-2-Jesus, for an allegedly illegal one-year jail sentence he received for practicing law without a license.
 
Several more bills have been filed in other cases of death and injury, most the result of traffic accidents.
 
Some claims bills are filed even after settlements or court verdicts against a state or local governmental agency.
 
Ordinarily, governments cannot be sued under the common law principle of sovereign immunity. Florida, though, has a limited waiver that allows payments of up to $200,000 per person or $300,000 per incident under a law that went into effect Oct. 1. Before then the limits were $100,000 per person and $200,000 per event.
 
Any compensation beyond those limits requires passage of a claims bill. Most have to be filed for many years before they are considered.
 
While the Brody and Dillon bills are high priorities for Haridopolos - he's personally sponsoring the latter - they rank much lower for House Speaker Dean Cannon. The Winter Park Republican said lawmakers should focus first on issues that affect all Floridians such as the state budget, but added that he'll try to accommodate Haridopolos.
 
Cannon said the Dillon bill did not get a floor vote last session because it never had a committee hearing in the House. As for the Brody bill, he said lawmakers just ran out of time.
 
The Senate, meanwhile, refused to pass unrelated legislation favored by the House in the waning hours, but Haridopolos wouldn't say whether he thought there was a connection.
 
"We can't go back in time, and we're not going back in time," he said. "I think these bills stand on their own quite well. I'm not going to negotiate for them."
 
Some lawmakers are philosophically opposed to claims bills. That includes Sen. Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican who is in line to become Senate president next November. He votes against most claims bills but made an exception for Dillon's.
 
"The claims bill process depends on how hard the biscuits were that morning at breakfast," Gaetz said. "It depends upon how good your lobbyist is and how much he gets paid and how well connected he is. It doesn't depend on the merits of the case necessarily."
 
A jury awarded Brody nearly $31 million, but a bill (SB 4) sponsored by Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto, R-Wellington, would authorize only half - $15.6 million. A companion bill (HB 445) in the House calls for the full amount.
 
Even the lower amount would be one of the largest claims bills ever, but it wouldn't cost taxpayers anything.
 
The Broward County Sheriff's Office has agreed to sign over to the Brody family its right to file a "bad faith" claim against the sheriff's insurance company for the authorized amount.
 
That claim would allege Ranger Insurance Co. repeatedly refused to settle for the policy limit of $3 million before the Brodys' lawsuit against the sheriff's office resulted in a verdict 10 times that amount.
 
Lance Block, the Brodys' lawyer, said the company's lawyers told him he'd never get a claims bill passed.
 
"And they spent a lot of money hiring lobbyists," Block said. "So far they've bottled it up for four years."
 
Ranger is offering to settle now for $8.5 million, which would include Block's fee. Benacquisto said that won't pay for the kind of around-the-clock care and treatment Brody needs. She said a study shows it'll take $10.1 million just for a life care plan.
 
Peter Antonacci, a lawyer for Ranger, told a Senate committee the company would fight the bad faith claim in court.
 
"He has to win every step of the way in order for him to receive a recovery," Antonacci said. "If he loses any step along the way he will receive nothing while he remains on public assistance."
 
Block, though, said Brody would be entitled to the $3 million policy limit if the bill passes regardless of the bad faith claim, but he acknowledged there's a possibility he might not the rest.
 
Florida law compensates people who are wrongfully convicted $50,000 for each year in prison, but Dillon doesn't qualify because he had a prior conviction for felony drug possession. Therefore, he needs a claims bill. His legislation (SB 2, HB 445) would pay him the $810,000, or $30,000 for every year he was imprisoned. He was freed in 2008 after the DNA on a bloody shirt that the killer left behind in 1981 didn't match his.
 
Now a singer-musician living in Chapel Hill, N.C., Dillon has released a CD titled "Black Robes and Lawyers." He says he's not bitter.
 
"For me it's just sadness," Dillon said. "Bitterness doesn't do anything in our lives. It eats us up. I'm just glad to be supported. For so long I felt it was just me."
 
© 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

ST. PETERSBURG - Those first few seconds, as John Brodnax had just opened an April 2009 issue of the St. Petersburg Times, he assumed the story he was about to read had something to do with presidential politics.

Beneath a photo caption was the phrase that made him think so: "White House."

Then he took in the photo of a squat, white building used for corporal punishment, and the words, "Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys."

Mr. Brodnax had told his children of prolonged beatings with a strap at the school, then known as the Florida School for Boys. He had spent the rest of his life trying to forget, and to provide a stable environment for his own children.

But anger about the past still burned inside him.

He showed his family the story. "It was one of those, 'I told you I wasn't lying,' " said daughter Mary Brodnax, 39.

Mr. Brodnax, one of many "White House boys" who have come forward to tell their stories, died Nov. 29, of pulmonary fibrosis. He was 68.

"John was beaten and beaten and beaten again," said Jerry Cooper, 66, who as a boy shared a cottage at the reform school with Mr. Brodnax in the late 1950s.

Offenses ranged from getting a boy an extra cup of coffee to another boy's use of tobacco, for which Mr. Brodnax took the blame.

In 1960 he stole a car and escaped. He married and drove a semitrailer truck, driving across the country under the handle "John the Baptist."

His children say they were almost never spanked, and that their father stood behind them even when they got in trouble. At Christmas, Mr. Brodnax dressed up as Santa Claus, carrying presents to his grandchildren in a red sack.

But certain things bothered him a great deal. For example, he could not abide the sound of slamming doors.

"I went through life being a mean, nasty, irritable person," he said in 2010. "I've come to realize that all of us were a lot alike when we come out of there."

Mr. Brodnax was born in St. Petersburg. His mother gave him away as a young child to another couple, his family said.

Five years ago, a genealogist in the family discovered that Mr. Brodnax had a half-brother living in Brandon.

"John showed up at my door," said Bill Goggio, 62. "He said, 'You're not going to believe this, but I'm your brother.' "

Mr. Brodnax attended several reunions of boys who had been held at the Dozier school, which was closed in June after a state investigation.

Two years ago, he and his wife, Mary, passed near Marianna on a trip to Georgia. Mr. Brodnax considered swinging by the school he had not seen in nearly 50 years.

"They were going to stop," his daughter said. "And my dad just couldn't do it."

Researcher Natalie Watson contributed to this report. Andrew Meacham can be reached at ameacham@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2248.

John Brodnax
Born: June 27, 1943
Died: Nov. 29, 2011

Survivors: wife, Mary Brodnax; daughter, Mary Brodnax; sons, John and William Brodnax; mother, Carolyn Wells; sister, Jenny Hawkins; brothers Orson Wells and Bill Goggio; six grandchildren.

By Steve Bousquet, Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau

TALLAHASSEE - Claude Kirk Jr., a colorful and confrontational leader who served as the first Republican governor of Florida since Reconstruction, died early Wednesday. He was 85.

A statement released by the Kirk family said he died peacefully in his sleep at home in West Palm Beach. He suffered a mild heart attack in February.

Gov. Kirk served one term as governor from 1967 to 1971, a turbulent period of Vietnam War protests, teacher strikes, school desegregation and massive population growth in the Sunshine State.

His presence at the center of the political stage made the times more unpredictable. He was sometimes so outrageous his name has come to be synonymous with flamboyance in politics in Florida.

He led Florida in a time of great upheaval, as a court-ordered remapping of legislative districts ended the control of the Pork Choppers, a band of rural North Florida conservatives. He helped usher in the 1968 Florida Constitution that created the office of lieutenant governor, required annual sessions of the Legislature and reorganized a bureaucratic backwater into a streamlined executive branch.

He was credited with placing greater emphasis on the environment, providing the impetus for a statewide law enforcement agency and injecting overdue energy into the Republican Party.

Most of all, Gov. Kirk relished a good fight.

He clashed repeatedly with the Democrat-controlled Legislature, the all-Democratic Cabinet and the courts. By the end of his term, voters had become weary of the circus-like atmosphere surrounding the man known as "Claudius Maximus."

In 1970, Florida voters elected Democrat Reubin Askew to succeed Gov. Kirk, and it would be 16 years before another Republican (Bob Martinez of Tampa) would become governor.

Gov. Kirk once called himself "a tree-shakin' son of a bitch," and laughed it off as a "clerical error" when a reporter exposed that he charged his honeymoon travel to Florida taxpayers.

He had a secret slush fund to augment his jet-setting lifestyle, financed by supporters, and he called it the Governor's Club.

He gave a $90,000 state contract to New York publicist William Safire, later the long-time New York Times columnist, to promote his image.

Gov. Kirk was a prosperous insurance executive from Jacksonville who had never held public office until his election in 1966. He won in large part because Democrats were bitterly divided over their nomination of Robert King High, a liberal Miami mayor, over Gov. Haydon Burns, who refused to endorse High.

"He marked the very beginning of the Republican growth in the state," said Curt Kiser, a former Pinellas County lawmaker who worked in Gov. Kirk's office while attending law school. "He was very innovative. He brought a lot of new people into state government and he helped fashion the modern image of Florida."

One of those people was Nathaniel Reed of Hobe Sound, a respected conservationist who became the first full-time environmental adviser to a Florida governor, at $1 a year.

"He was brash, rude, domineering, inventive, determined and marvelously good-humored," Reed said Wednesday.

Reed said Gov. Kirk was persuaded to drop his support for such "boondoggles" as a jetport in the Everglades and the Cross-Florida Barge Canal, and he ended the practice of untreated sewage being flushed into the Atlantic Ocean.

After serving as governor, Gov. Kirk ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate and state education commissioner. In 1984, he submitted his name as a presidential candidate in New Hampshire.

He worked as a business consultant, made speeches, and doted on his grandchildren.

At a 2006 symposium at the University of Central Florida, Gov. Kirk criticized his successors for not dealing with a water shortage, pollution by sugar growers and the high school dropout rate.

Recalling that he broke ground at the Orlando campus while governor, Gov. Kirk said: "I dug the dirt that started this place."

Claude Roy Kirk Jr. was born in San Bernardino, Calif., where his parents, Claude Sr. and Sarah Mrytle McClure Kirk, worked as railroad clerks. The family later moved to Chicago where his father sold mobile homes, and later to Montgomery, Ala.

After graduating from Lanier High School in Montgomery in 1943, during World War II, Kirk joined the Marine Corps Reserves and served with an artillery unit in the United States. He was called back to active duty during the Korean War and awarded the Air Medal of the Marine Corps and discharged as a first lieutenant in 1952.

He earned a bachelor of science degree at Duke University and a law degree from the University of Alabama.

In addition to his wife, Kirk is survived by seven children: Sarah, Katherine, William, Frank, Adriana, Claudia and Erik. He also is survived by 14 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

The family said information on services and memorial contributions will be forthcoming.
. . .
From the moment he became the state's 36th governor, on Jan. 3, 1967, Gov. Kirk displayed a flair for the dramatic. In his inaugural address, he called for a special session of the Legislature to write a new state Constitution. He also said he was setting up a private police force to drive organized crime out of the state, and hired the Wackenhut security agency to lead a so-called "war on crime."

At his inaugural ball that night, Gov. Kirk stole the spotlight from Perry Como and the Ray Charles Singers by introducing his glamorous escort as "Madame X, my very good friend." The "mystery woman" turned out to be his future second wife, German-born Erika Mattfeld.

The next day, the soon-to-be first couple vanished for a surprise vacation. Reporters found them at the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, relaxing on George Wackenhut's yacht, named Security Risk.

The two had met in Brazil where Erika was working as a model and TV actress, and were married in February 1967, about a month after Kirk became governor.

After fathering three children while governor, Gov. Kirk liked to call his administration "the most productive in Florida history."

Gov. Kirk had a promoter's instinct for salesmanship and he never tired of the limelight. His last major public appearance was at Gov. Rick Scott's inauguration in January.

Kiser recalled that one of his duties was to promote Gov. Kirk as a possible vice-presidential running mate of Richard Nixon in 1968 by mailing packets of Kirk press clippings to GOP activists across the country.

"Part of my job was to help promote the governor's name nationwide," said Kiser, a lawyer and lobbyist in Tallahassee.

But when Nixon chose Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew instead, a piqued Gov. Kirk threw his support to New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

The second half of Gov. Kirk's term was marked by a series of controversies, most notably a statewide teachers' strike and Gov. Kirk's defiance of a court order desegregating Florida schools. Gov. Kirk at one point suspended the entire Manatee County School Board and appointed himself school superintendent.

After first signaling his support for a huge pay raise for legislators, Gov. Kirk vetoed it, which infuriated lawmakers, who overrode his veto.

Kiser recalled hearing there were two versions of a Kirk speech - one if he signed the pay raise and one if he vetoed it. "We all were in the dark," Kiser said. "We didn't know which speech he was going to give until he went up to the chambers."

"He double-crossed the Legislature by promising lawmakers a pay raise and then vetoing it, after which the angry legislators overrode the veto and never paid any attention to him again," Martin Dyckman wrote in the St. Petersburg Times.

Reporter Don Pride, who covered Kirk for the Times, said he was writing a column one Saturday afternoon in his office in the sub-basement of the historic Old Capitol and had his 4-year-old son Rob in tow when Gov. Kirk popped his head into the news office.

The governor whisked the boy into his waiting state limousine with the small American flags on the fenders, and they went to the Governor's Mansion where they toured the rooms and rode up and down the elevator.

On the spot, Pride abandoned the critical column on Gov. Kirk that he planned and told the story of Gov. Kirk's visit with his son instead.

It was a different time, Pride said, when Gov. Kirk provided beer to reporters at press parties at the Governor's Mansion, which had a bar stocked with gin and Scotch. They all played slow-pitch softball on the mansion front lawn.

Pride said Gov. Kirk once broke his arm in a game by sliding into a tree that served as third base, and that Gov. Kirk liked being photographed with his arm in a sling.

"Kirk was really a showman," Pride said.

Times staff writers Craig Basse and Andrew Meacham and researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report, and information from Current Biography and the Associated Press was used. Steve Bousquet can be reached at bousquet@sptimes.com or (850) 224-7263.

. Biography

Claude Roy Kirk, Jr.

Born: Jan. 7, 1926

Died: Sept. 28, 2011

Survivors: wife Erika Mattfeld Kirk; sons William, Frank and Erik, and daughters Sarah, Katherine, Adriana and Claudia

Service: Not yet announced.

Nathaniel Reed Statement on Gov. Kirk's Passing

Nathaniel Reed was the first full-time environmental adviser to a Florida governor and currently serves on the Board of The Everglades Foundation. He released this statement on Wednesday.

Governor Kirk's passing highlights an era when, as governor, he challenged the old guard that had run Florida since reconstruction. Governor Kirk came into office determined to change Florida against all opponents. He was brash, rude, domineering, inventive, determined and marvelously good-humored. Re-apportionment in 1968 brought to Tallahassee numerous young vibrant men and women to become members of an astonishing legislature. It was an era of great change, often controversial, always fascinating.

From an environmental standpoint, he never wavered. It's hard to believe now, but millions of gallons of untreated sewage were flushed into the Atlantic Ocean from Palm Beach to Key West, from Pensacola to Fort Myers. Not a single industry in Florida could receive the initial federal pollution control permits. To change this incredible mess was controversial and expensive, but against all odds Kirk succeeded where others were fearful of even trying.

He never wavered in his determination to change Florida's long legacy of what Philip Wiley described as Florida, "the polluted paradise." Kirk could be very stubborn, but he could be convinced to change his mind. For instance, he once supported the cross-state barge canal and the Big Cypress jetport and the development of what is now Biscayne National Park. But when presented with the facts of environmental damage each project would create, he turned and became an ardent and effective opponent of all boondoggles.

He successfully urged passage of Florida's first green bond issue which brought many popular state parks into our system, he supported the acquisition of the Big Cypress, he fought for more water to be delivered to Everglades National Park. His successors, governors Askew and Graham inherited a new Florida successfully built on conservation foundations of the Kirk era. . . .

It has often been said, no man enjoyed being governor of Florida as much as Claude Kirk.
---------------------------------------------
Governor Kirk's passing highlights an era of great change in Florida's government. Ever since reconstruction, Florida had been run by a small group of powerful individuals who liked their special privileges and fought for them. Kirk was determined to change the old system and challenge the old guard. After Kirk, the notorious "pork chop gang" were put out to pasture and Florida reaped the benefits of a new generation of leaders who would bring prosperity based in large part on Florida's natural gifts.

Today the good lord has welcomed home a man who cherished and protected a special place in his creation: the peninsula now known as Florida.

MIAMI HERALD

Posted on Fri, Dec. 02, 2011
Feds condemn conditions at Florida youth prisons
By Carol Marbin Miller
cmarbin@MiamiHerald.com 
 

Former residents of a now-shuttered, state-run youth camp in North Florida tour a building where they say they were severely abused. The residents returned to the building in October 2009 to describe what they endured. Florida’s youth-corrections system is so poorly administered that children are assaulted by officers, denied necessary medical care and punished harshly for minor infractions, a federal report released Friday concludes.
Conditions are so severe, the U.S. Department of Justice said, that they violate the Constitution.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a scathing 28-page report Friday on conditions at two North Florida youth prisons, the Dozier School for Boys and the Jackson Juvenile Offender Center. Though the two camps were both shut down by state juvenile-justice administrators earlier this year, the report said the state’s “failed system of oversight and accountability” likely has resulted in dangerous conditions at youth prisons throughout the state.
“These conditions return youth to the community no better — and likely less-equipped to succeed than when they were first incarcerated,” Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez wrote in a Dec. 1 letter to Gov. Rick Scott, adding that such practices “erode public confidence in the juvenile justice system and interfere with the state’s efforts to reduce crime.”
Though the report is strongly worded, neither Perez nor the report itself suggested that the Justice Department intended to take further action.
The investigation, which began in April 2010, concerned two large youth camps in the Panhandle — Dozier, a 159-acre campus that had been open for 110 years, and the nearby Jackson Juvenile Offender Center, or JJOC, which later combined with Dozier to form the North Florida Youth Development Center. Dozier had been the subject of intense scrutiny since October 2008, when The Miami Herald reported on The White House Boys, a group of now-older adult men who said they had been beaten and raped at the facility during their youth.
And though investigators confined their research to the two Panhandle youth prisons, they concluded that the conditions they found likely permeate the state’s youth-corrections system as a whole.
“Florida’s oversight system failed to detect and sufficiently address the problems we found at Dozier and JJOC,” the report said. “We find that many of the problems we identified … are the result of a systemic lack of training, supervision and oversight.”
The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice’s spokesman, C.J. Drake, said Friday that the U.S. department’s findings do not apply to other residential programs throughout the state.
Last August, DJJ Secretary Wansley Walters said that the use of physical force on youths had dropped by 41.6 percent during the past two years as the state adopted a set of “best practices” in behavior management. In the past year alone, Walters said, more than half of the DJJ’s residential programs either reduced or eliminated the use of physical force.
“The issues and concerns raised in the investigative report on allegations of past staff misconduct at the closed [North Florida youth camp] are, in fact, confined to the closed facility and are not duplicated elsewhere in the DJJ system,” Drake said Friday.
“We have taken and will continue to take swift and appropriate action to address any conduct that violates laws, policies, or the safety and dignity of the youth in our care,” he added. Since 2008, in fact, the DJJ has either closed or substantially reduced 23 residential programs across the state that performed poorly.Roy Miller, a children’s advocate who heads the Florida Children’s Campaign and has been a long-time critic of the state’s youth-corrections program, said Friday he remains unconvinced that the state has implemented meaningful reform.
“I have no confidence that this is not a systemic problem,” Miller said. “Every time horrifying abuse has occurred, we get the same story from DJJ, that it is not systemic.”
Among the problems the U.S. Justice Department found:
• Juveniles sent to the youth camps were subjected to unnecessary — and often excessive — physical force, including violent takedowns, choking and restraints that can lead to asphyxiation.
In the spring of 2006, the Florida Legislature banned a host of so-called compliance techniques and takedowns in the wake of a national scandal, the death of 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson, who died after guards at a Panama City boot camp punched, kneed and choked off his air supply during a long, violent restraint. The Martin Lee Anderson Act banned the use of stun guns, pepper spray, pressure points, mechanical restraints and psychological intimidation unless a child is a threat to himself or others.
The Justice Department, however, said guards in North Florida used “dangerous” face-down restraint techniques, choked youths and used handcuffs on children who were not resisting.A September 2010 incident that was captured on video showed a guard who “appeared to strike and choke” a youth who “was not engaged in violent or disruptive behavior.” The guard had “slammed” the boy into furniture and then the ground, shook the boy’s arm, and then tried to force the youth’s arm behind his back, though the youth appeared only to “be trying to avoid further confrontation,” the report said.
• Staff members at the camps also used isolation and confinement as punishment, the report said, though most experts discourage the use of isolation for all but emergency situations. And isolation was used, the report said, for “minor infractions.”
At Dozier, youths were placed in either a “controlled observation” area — the written procedure was to confine the youth for only a two-hour “cool-down” period — or in a longer-term Behavior Management Unit for up to 21 days. The report describes the two units as “particularly harsh environments,” where youths were held in 9.8-by-5.5-foot cells with locked doors, bars and only a concrete slab for a bed. Administrators would place a “thin mattress” on the slab at bedtime.
• Guards exercised “deliberate indifference” to the needs of children in their care, including youths who were at risk of killing themselves.
“Suicidal youths were sent to isolation, although the facility rules prohibit confinement of such youths,” the report said, adding: “This practice is very dangerous.”
• Youths may have been discouraged from seeking medical care, because they had to request a sick call from the same employees who may have abused them. And youths who were in the behavior management unit “did not receive adequate medical care, assessment of their mental health … or assistance in determining whether they should be discharged from confinement.”
Last July, 18-year-old Eric Perez died at the Palm Beach County detention center after several guards and administrators ignored his pleas for medical attention.
Perez’s death remains under investigation by both the DJJ and a West Palm Beach grand jury.  © 2011 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/02/v-print/2529226/feds-condemn-conditions-at-now.html#storylink=cpy

The First “Longest Yard.”
Posted: February 24, 2010
by Bill Warner, P.I.

Why Was FSU Hall Of Fame Football Player And Ex NY Giant Vic Prinzi The Coach For The Florida Industrial School for Boys at Marianna State Prison in 1961, Why was Vic Prinzi coaching the Coach Dozier School For Boys State Prison football team in 1961 ? Why was the Dozier School For Boys State Prison football team practicing in full pads in June of 1961

FDLE reviewed and analyzed the following documentation to identify the Florida Industrial School for Boys at Marianna State Prison deceased: School ledgers, student record books, the School’s publication of The Yellow Jacket, local and national newspapers, the Florida Department of State Library and Archives, and the Florida Department of Health Division of Vital Statistics.  Photographs were taken of the ledger entries and The Yellow Jacket newspaper articles due to their delicate condition and photocopies were made of all other documents.
Vic Prinzi Florida State University Football Quaterback 1954 to 1958, NY Giants 1958 to 1960, Coach Florida Industrial School for Boys at Marianna State Prison 1961, what ?
During his playing days as a starting quarterback and defensive back, Vic Prinzi embodied the early days of Florida State football. Prinzi began his career as a freshman in 1954, grabbing national headlines for his three touchdown performance against VMI as a fifth-string quarterback. He was joined in the backfield that year by long-time friend Burt Reynolds.  As a senior co-captain of the 1958 team, Prinzi helped guide the Seminoles to a 7-4 record and a berth in the Bluegrass Bowl while leading the team in passing.  Vic Prinzi FSU Hall of Fame Class:1988 (Football)

Prinzi played briefly with the New York Giants and the Denver Broncos before joining the high school and college coaching ranks for 12 seasons. He later was the color analysts on FSU radio broadcasts.

Why was Vic Prinzi coaching the Coach Dozier School For Boys Florida State Prison football team in 1961 ?  Why was the Dozier School For Boys State Prison football team practicing in full pads in June of 1961, which is strictly prohibited for all school teams in the State of Florida (no Summer practice for high school age) ?

Vic Prinzi (quarterback) and Burt Reynolds (running back) were football teammates at Florida State University and then long time friends.
Vic Prinzi, ex-pro quarterback, played pro football with the NY Ginats from 1958 to 1960, and then ends up as the football coach for the Dozier School For Boys Florida State Prison football team in 1961, (who are a travel team and play teams in Georgia and Alabama), were the games were heavily bet on by State Prison officals.

Burt Reynolds when onto movie stardom and in 1974 has the lead role in “the Longest Yard” as an ex-pro footbal quarterback sent to a Florida State Prison where he coach’s the convicts to play the guards (who have a travel team and play for money).
 
Burt Reynolds kept numerous friends in Tampa over the years, among them photographer Simon Rose; auto dealer Ernie Haire; former football teammate and stockbroker Victor Prinzi; businesswoman Woodward; restaurateur Malio Iavarrone; real estate developer George Courtner; and WTVT sports director Andy Hardy.
Reynolds always reciprocated good deeds and did TV commercials for the Haire auto dealership after Ernie Haire lent him his helicopter for several emergencies. He named Dom DeLuise’s character in 1981′s big screen hit “The Cannonball Run” after his college buddy Victor Prinzi. Wanting to be near Pam Seales, a good friend and head cocktail waitress at Malio’s Restaurant who had been introduced to him by Vic Prinzi, Reynolds insisted that Universal Pictures make “Cop and a Half” in Tampa and it was done. Ironically, Vic Prinzi had been best man at Reynolds wedding to Loni Anderson.

Jerry Arthur Cooper-A Whitehouse Boy and the star quarteback on the 1961 Florida Industrial School for Boys at Marianna State Prison football team has provided the details and goes onto to claim that one of the football players on the team, Edgar Elton, was murdered boy the one armed man “Troy Tidwell” at what is now the Dozier School for boys.  The Florida Department of Agriculture which ran the boys prison in 1961 has a lot of explaining to do.
 


“There is no doubt that many deaths (killings) occurred at the Florida Industrial School for Boys at Marianna. Most will be denied by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement as well as the Department of Juvenile Justice. It appears that even the deaths that can be substantiated will be covered up and considered as nothing more than a “normal passing.”
 
Below is an article which appeared in the Florida School for Boys Yellow Jacket Newspaper on July 10, 1961 as well as a picture of Edgar Elton, a sixteen year old boy, who was unnecessarily murdered during an illegal football practice in the school gymnasium ( see Edgar Elton in the football photo above taken in June 1961).

This is the truth how Edgar Elton died on July 10th 1961. The Yellow Jacket football team was in a practice session in the gym that day. It was not a physical fitness class as reported by the Yellow Jacket Newspaper which I just saw for the first time today Feb.18, 2010 which I received from Roger Kiser. The whole Yellow Jacket article is a complete and total Lie. 
I was the second player in line behind Edgar during a very fast pace passing session. It was extremely fast and very exhausting, and it was very difficult for every team member to keep pace. Edgar went into an asthma attack and fell to his knees. Gasping for air, he told me he couldn’t breath and that he had a letter given to the school (by parents and his private doctor) that he was not suppose to be playing any form of sports.

I told him to go to Troy Tidwell and Mr. Hatton who were both present in the gym. As he climbed to his feet and stumbled toward them; he was met by Tidwell about half-court. Tidwell screamed “get your ass back in line.” When I broke line to tell them he was having a breathing attack; Hatton reached up to his side and placed his hand on his pistol, which he carried under the gray jacket he always wore. Tidwell turned toward me and then he began screaming calling me a “xxxxxxxx”. The next run Edgar made would be his last. He collapsed and died within a minute. He was not rushed to the hospital as stated in the article. Dr. Wexler showed up ten or fifteen minutes later and pronounced him dead. His lifeless body was lying on the floor. No other Doctor was involved, whatsoever.
 
Portions of Troy Tidwell deposition-The beater of thousands of young boys, click here for VIDEO.
The Dozier School for Boys State Prison had hired a professional football player/coach Vic Prinzi  who had been an all-star quarterback for the Florida State University, who went on to play quarterback position for Denver Bronco’s and the New York Giants.  Formally he had been injured and had his spleen removed. We had a coach who was a permanent employee on staff. Why was such an important coach necessary, like Vic Prinzi, to coach us? He never actually showed up at any of our games, only during practice sessions.

Football was very important to Mr. Dozier, school superintendent, as well as too many of the other staff. I really think that Vic Prinzi may have been privately compensated by Mr. Dozier and other staff members as he was not on the Florida state payroll.  Arthur Dozier and many other staff members were placing large financial bets on the outcome of the game(s). That was the advantage of us having a pro player coach and practicing illegally ( not within season regulations) while holding our training exercises hidden inside the gym and then later on hiding our practice sessions behind the baseball field, located behind the large school house.

Poor review for Marianna’s Dozier School for Boys; Report notes various other problems at the school that serves Northeast Florida By Jim Schoettler Story updated at 11:24 PM on Thursday, Dec. 31, 2009.

Breakdowns in security and inadequate medical treatment for students at a troubled high-risk reform school in Marianna are among the many criticisms leveled against the state-run facility in an annual assessment of the program.

The report, known as a quality assurance review, describes chaotic conditions at the Dozier School for Boys, including reports of gang fights, students being allowed by staff to punish other youths and a lack of medical attention for the ill. A majority of youth surveys reviewed for the assessment said students didn’t feel safe because of threats from other youths and staff.

At least nine students were hospitalized in the past six months because of brawls at the school, the report said. The review, done in October, indicated that several staff members were caught sleeping or falsifying logs used to check on youths. Seven have either resigned, been fired or face termination, more from this source……
 

Bill Warner Director of CSPI..Covert Surveillance by Private Investigators at WBI Inc

'White House Boy' claims startling find - Have boys' graves been found?
Published : Tuesday, 27 Dec 2011, 6:22 PM EST
Tanya Arja - FOX 13 News reporter

'White House Boy' claims startling find: MyFoxTAMPABAY.com

"I was having a hard time because I didn't know if I was in a cemetery," he recalled. "I couldn't find anything. Then all of a sudden I spotted a slab that was covered with leaves and barely one corner of it sticking out. Then I started looking around and I saw more and more."

Cooper saw small bricks, with what looked like letters or names on it. He found a headstone.

His stomach dropped as he looked around.

"My heart jumped. The adrenaline hit me then: I'm in the right place."

Jerry says the former campus of the Florida School for Boys is just a stone's throw from the cemetery property. And while he has no idea who is buried here, he wants to know more.

Cooper is one of 300 men now in their 50's and 60's. They say they were beaten here as children.

They're known as the White House Boys, named after a little white concrete building they all called the White House. That's where they say they were beaten by staff members.

Cooper says on one occasion he got 135 licks after the staff thought he lied.

"The strap itself was three inches wide, a half-inch thick," he remembered.

He says the smell of the room was sickening.

"It was nasty. It smelled. A good word for it would be vomit. The cot I was strapped to had a mattress but no sheets and the pillow was God-awful filthy and stinky."

Cooper drove to Marianna to look for the cemetery.

"I can't say what's in there, we don't know that yet."

The state of Florida investigated two years ago but said they found no evidence of abuse. But now the U.S. Department of Justice is doing their own investigation.

They only looked back to the 80's, but say they did find evidence of excessive force used by guards on the boys. And they said the state of Florida failed in their job to detect and resolve the problems.

Cooper is thankful the federal government is looking into this.

"The state right now is under the watch. We don't know what's going to happen. But I feel since the White House Boys have gotten involved [exposing] what it's really like at some of these institutions in the state of Florida, and now the Department of Justice has proved it."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Youths hear hard truths

By Tony Holt

Jerry Cooper didn't speak for long.

He declined to go into much detail about his experiences as a teenager being housed at the now-defunct Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna.

He got his point across after he described one horrifying experience.

"It was really bad back then, guys," he said to a room full of boys at the Eckard Youth Alternatives facility near Brooksville. "It was really, really bad."

Cooper recalled how, as a 16-year-old 50 years ago, he went to sleep each night wearing a nightgown.

He said all the boys at the school wore them. They were designed to deter boys from running away.

"We were petrified of this school," Cooper said of Dozier.

To this day, the U.S. Army veteran and retired businessman takes prescribed medication. He has learned to manage his anger while the memories of his experiences remain vivid.

One morning, a guard awakened him at 2 a.m.

Inside the infamous white house, Cooper was lashed 135 times from his back to his knees. Cooper said the guards suspected he knew something about a runaway.

He swore he didn't. The guard didn't listen as he continued whipping. Cooper remembers his nightgown sticking to his open wounds.

That was the only story he told to the boys — all of whom had their eyes fixed on him.

Cooper, who lives in Cape Coral, has testified against the abuse at Dozier. He was joined by hundreds of others with similar experiences. They call themselves the White House Boys.

Their campaign was an integral part in the eventual shutdown of Dozier.

"You guys have got it made," Cooper told the group at Eckard. "You really do."

He tried opening up a discussion a couple of times. Most of the stunned, shy boys — who mostly ranged in age from 14 to 17 — didn't speak.

One told Cooper the most he worried about while at the facility was insects. Sometimes the boys set up camp and sleep under tents. He didn't like the thought of bugs crawling over him.

Cooper laughed.

"Bugs, huh? Well, put something over you," he told the teen.

Cooper purposely kept the mood light. He referred to the bags of gifts the boys were about to receive. They included warm clothing, shampoo and other necessities.

"I should've gotten you some bug spray," he said to the teen seated in the back.

Lisa Anspacher, an administrative coordinator at Eckard, said Cooper's message had a double meaning.

Cooper, said Anspacher, knows how it is to feel neglected at an early age. Emotionally, he sunk to a dark place, but picked up the pieces and carried on living a prosperous life.

"What they've done in the past doesn't define them," Anspacher said of the teens at Eckard, all of whom have had troubles with discipline.

Anspacher said Cooper's message also was a warning. Further problems could lead them to a place where compassion is lacking.

Cooper didn't just give a talk and leave. Before he addressed the boys Wednesday, he sat down and had a heart-to-heart talk with one in particular, someone who was having a hard time changing his ways.

Cooper didn't give him any warnings or threats. He listened, Anspacher said.

He gave the boy his phone number. He promised him he would return to see him graduate.

Cooper said he was there to "give these guys some kind of guidance."

He has little faith in Florida's ability to regulate detention facilities. He said horrors still continue elsewhere. He hasn't given up the fight.

Cooper warned the boys of what could happen next. He told them they would be in the worst situation of their lives if they went to prison.

"You will be targeted immediately," Cooper told them. "You're not going to like that."

Hernando Today © Copyright 2011 Media General Communications Holdings, LLC. A Media General company.

DJJ TARGETS SIX EMPLOYEES FOR DISMISSAL OVER TEEN'S DEATH IN LOCKUP

From the MIAMI HERALD BLOG

Posted on Tuesday, 12.27.11
Carol Marbin Miller, Miami Herald staff writer

Florida juvenile justice administrators have fired two detention center employees from West Palm Beach — and initiated actions to fire four others — five months after they were linked to the death of an 18-year-old youth at the lockup.
The lockup’s top administrators, Superintendent Anthony Flowers and Assistant Superintendent Patricia Hammond, both were fired Tuesday.
The agency also began the process of firing four guards, the department announced in a news release Tuesday.
“We will not tolerate employees who violate policies and procedures that are in place to protect the health and welfare of our youth,” said Wansley Walters, a former Miami juvenile justice chief who has been DJJ’s secretary for the past year. “DJJ employees have since been retrained on policies and procedures for the appropriate management of youth in our detention facilities.”
“We continue to extend our deepest sympathy to the Perez family during this difficult period,” Walters added.
The Palm Beach Juvenile Detention Center will be managed by Superintendent Daryl Wolf of the Broward Juvenile Detention Center and Superintendent Kevin Housel of the St. Lucie Regional Juvenile Detention Center until a permanent replacement is found, the agency said.
The firings are in response to the death of 18-year-old Eric Perez, “after a thorough review of the facility’s operations and management,” the agency said. His death remains under investigation by the agency, the West Palm Beach Police and the State Attorney’s Office.Eric died shortly after 8 a.m. on July 10, after spending several hours retching and complaining he had monstrous head pain. Guards and supervisors didn’t call 911 until it was too late.
In addition to Flowers and Hammond, the agency intends to fire:
• Officer Marlon Jarrell
• Officer Christian Lewis
• Officer Alberto Rios
• Officer Darrell Smith

Keep reading the story below.--

MIAMI HERALD

Posted on Tuesday, 12.27.11

JUVENILE JUSTICE
6 fired over teen’s death in lockup
By Carol Marbin Miller The Miami Herald 

Maritza Perez, mother of 18-year-old Eric Perez, who died in the West Palm Beach juvenile lockup. Damon Higgins / The Palm Beach Post

Eric Perez, who died in the West Palm Beach juvenile lockup in July 2011. 2
Photos By Carol Marbin Miller
cmarbin@MiamiHerald.com

Five months after an 18-year-old youth died at a West Palm Beach lockup after waiting in vain for medical care, Florida juvenile justice administrators grew tired of waiting for law enforcement authorities to act: On Tuesday, they announced their decision to fire six employees they believe share responsibility.
The terminations on Tuesday of the Palm Beach County lockup’s top two administrators, along with four guards, bring to nine the number of juvenile justice employees who were fired in the wake of the July death of 18-year-old Eric Perez, who was arrested with a small amount of marijuana after police discovered a broken light on his bicycle.
Florida Department of Juvenile Justice administrators announced the terminations amid ongoing probes by the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office and West Palm Beach police — though DJJ chiefs initially had said they would await the results of those investigations before acting.
“It has now been more than five months since Eric’s death and the commencement of the criminal investigation,” DJJ Secretary Wansley Walters wrote in a letter Tuesday to State Attorney Michael McAuliffe. “We understand your office will present its findings to a grand jury, but we have not been informed as to when that may take place. Likewise, your office has provided no information as to when the Medical Examiner will issue a final autopsy report declaring the cause of Eric’s death.
“More than five months after Eric’s death, this agency is now obliged to take appropriate administrative action against the employees in question. DJJ has been paying their salaries, but has had to assign staff from other detention facilities to cover their positions. This has put a strain on DJJ and its employees, both fiscally and operationally. We cannot begin to make the necessary changes at the detention center until we can make the appropriate personnel changes,” she added.
Tuesday’s firings come amid a series of setbacks for the long-troubled youth corrections agency: In early December, 17-year-old Daniel Huerta was killed when a 2003 Ford Expedition driven by a youth camp employee slammed into a traffic sign and plunged into a canal. The driver, 25-year-old Johnson Atilard, had been issued at least 18 tickets in the previous few years, including five for speeding. And his personnel file showed he had been forbidden to drive the program’s youth, or cars.
DJJ is also embroiled in a controversy involving one of Walters’ best friends, who had been accused in an agency inspector general report of misspending more than $100,000 in state money. Though both DJJ and state financial watchdogs had recommended it, Walters failed for months to seek a refund. Months after the report was complete, but after a reporter asked questions of the agency, the report was reclassified as a “draft,” and Gov. Rick Scott’s chief inspector general was assigned to re-evaluate its findings.
Eric died shortly after 8 a.m. on July 10, after spending several hours retching and complaining he had monstrous head pain. Guards and supervisors didn’t call 911 until it was too late.
Beginning around 1:30 a.m., records show, Eric began to complain of a severe headache, and he spent the next several hours vomiting and apparently hallucinating that someone was on top of him. He was pronounced dead at 8:09 a.m. A lockup guard who was fired as a result of Eric’s death told The Herald his supervisor and the detention center’s superintendent barred him from calling 911 to seek help for the teen.
At the center of the probe into Eric’s death are seven to eight hours of videotape that purportedly document both Eric’s suffering and the actions of agency employees. A state law that went into effect over the summer prohibits the release of images that depict a person’s death. Eric’s mother, Maritza Perez, initially said she would seek release of the video — to which she is entitled under the law. But Perez later withdrew a request for the video at the urging of prosecutors. Perez declined to discuss the case with a reporter Tuesday.
“At significant cost, DJJ provided hundreds of employee hours and thousands of dollars for video experts and additional equipment so that the investigators, including those from your office, could view and safeguard any video evidence,” Walters wrote in her letter to McAuliffe.
Two of the guards terminated Tuesday, Darrell Smith and Alberto Rios, were given pink slips for engaging in “physical contact or horseplay” with the teen on July 9 after Perez and other detainees had left the cafeteria following snacks. A third officer, Christian Lewis, “failed to ensure the safety of the youth” when he saw Rios and Smith roughhouse with the teen and failed to stop them. The fourth officer, Marlon D. Jarrell, was fired because he “observed a youth in need of medical attention but failed to follow the procedures” for after-hours healthcare, according to records provided to The Herald Tuesday.
The dismissal letters for Superintendent Anthony Flowers and Assistant Superintendent Patricia Hammond, sent out Tuesday, offer no specific reasons for their terminations, other than “poor performance” and “negligence.”
Three other employees from the lockup — officers Terrance Davis, Laryell King and Floyd Powell — all were suspended, and then fired in July. King had been fired by DJJ in 2008 for “negligently” leaving a youth alone and unsupervised for 45 minutes at a lockup in Orlando, The Herald reported. Despite a note in her file declaring “NO rehire in any position,” she was hired to staff the West Palm lockup in September 2010.
“We will not tolerate employees who violate policies and procedures that are in place to protect the health and welfare of our youth,” said Walters, a former Miami-Dade juvenile justice chief before being named the head of DJJ. “DJJ employees have since been retrained on policies and procedures for the appropriate management of youth in our detention facilities.”
“We continue to extend our deepest sympathy to the Perez family during this difficult period,” Walters added.
The Palm Beach Juvenile Detention Center will be managed by Superintendent Daryl Wolf of the Broward Juvenile Detention Center and Superintendent Kevin Housel of the St. Lucie Regional Juvenile Detention Center until a permanent replacement is found, the agency said.
Eric’s death was eerily similar to that of Omar Paisley, a 17-year-old Opa-locka boy who died at the Miami lockup on June 9, 2003, of a ruptured appendix after begging guards and nurses for medical care for three days. Following the scandal — lawmakers at the time said the agency was permeated by a “culture of neglect” — about 25 DJJ officials left the agency, including then Secretary W.G. “Bill” Bankhead, two of his top assistants, the lockup’s superintendent and the assistant superintendent. Most of the employees were fired.
A Miami-Dade grand jury that investigated Omar’s death called it “tragic” and “preventable,” and indicted two nurses. One of the two later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Charges against the other were dismissed.

Federal Investigation Confirms Abuse at Dozier, suggests children in danger at other facilities 
By Ben Montgomery, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Saturday, December 3, 2011

The U.S. Department of Justice has blasted the state for failing to properly treat and protect children who were housed at the now-shuttered Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, Florida's first and oldest state-run reform school that closed in June after 111 years of operation.

The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice's failure to oversee the program and prevent children from being abused and neglected suggests other programs have similar issues, according to the report by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, released late Friday.

"Although Dozier and JJOC (the Jackson Juvenile Offender Center on Dozier's campus) are now shuttered, these problems persist due to the weaknesses in the state's oversight system and from a correspondent lack of training and supervision," the report said. "Our findings remain relevant to the conditions of confinement for the youth confined in Florida's remaining juvenile justice facilities."

The Justice Department's investigation, announced in 2010 to then-Gov. Charlie Crist, showed "reasonable cause to believe that the state of Florida was engaged in a pattern or practice of failing to have proper measures of accountability that led to serious deficiencies."

The Justice Department alleged many instances in which the state violated the constitutional rights of the boys, ages 13 to 21, confined to Dozier, and said the state must take immediate measures to "assess the full extent of its failed oversight" to protect children at its other facilities. The state must also strengthen its oversight processes by implementing a more rigorous system of hiring, training and accountability, the report said.

DJJ spokesman C.J. Drake said Florida has already implemented a number of reforms and has seen a dramatic reduction in the use of physical techniques to control children. He also said the state has closed or substantially reduced 23 residential programs statewide since 2008 because of performance issues.

"That's because we proactively identify problems in our residential programs and take swift corrective action," Drake said. "Residential programs that cannot implement and sustain corrective actions are closed."

DJJ Secretary Wansley Walters, who took over the department in January, was not available to comment on the report, Drake said.

The Department of Justice found:

• Staff used excessive force on youths, including choking and mechanical restraints. It documented incidents caught on tape in which guards violently pushed youths to the ground, and struck and choked youths. Staff unlawfully shackled youths with mechanical restraints as a first response to youths who did not respond to verbal commands. One youth was held face-down on the floor for 48 minutes and placed in mechanical restrains for an additional three hours and 17 minutes.

• Youths were often disciplined for minor infractions through inappropriate uses of lengthy and unnecessary isolation without due process. The report documented one case in which a boy was kept in isolation — inside a small cell with a concrete-slab bed and thin mattress — for two weeks. And shortly after he was released, he was sent back to isolation.

• Staff were not appropriately trained and had a generally "laissez-faire attitude" toward suicidal youth. The report noted that average pay for direct-care staff fell below $12 an hour, well below the nationwide median hourly wage for correctional officers of $18.78.

• The safety of youths was compromised as a result of their relocation to the Jackson Juvenile Offender Center (a more restrictive and punitive facility on the Dozier campus).

• The state failed to provide necessary and appropriate rehabilitative services to address addiction, mental health or behavioral needs, which served as a barrier to the youths' ability to return to the community and not reoffend.

• Youths were subjected to unnecessary and unconstitutional frisk searches. Dozier youths were frisk searched more than 10 times per day. One told investigators, "Some staff rub on your privates." Another said staff "touch too much."

"The failure to address these concerns not only harms the youth, but has a negative impact on public confidence and public safety," the report said. "The critical role of the juvenile justice system to correct and rehabilitate is being abdicated and youth may well be leaving the system with additional physical and psychological barriers to success."

The Dozier school in Marianna, about 60 miles west of Tallahassee, has been the subject of an ongoing investigative series in the St. Petersburg Times called "For Their Own Good." The facility has been exposed a number of times for abuse and neglect. The Department of Justice's investigation confirms much of what the Times has reported.

"What the Department of Justice has done in this report is help us look back at what was and gives us a true guide for what should never, ever happen again," said child advocate Jack Levine, who exposed abuse at Dozier in the early 1980s that prompted a federal class-action lawsuit against the state.

Drake, the DJJ spokesman, said the department is working on a response to the report.

"The issues at Dozier occurred long before this administration took office and it was this administration that closed that facility," he said. "We … do not tolerate misconduct or poor performance. If we identify it we seek to correct it, and if it's not corrected it's closed."

Times staff writer Waveney Ann Moore contributed to this report.  Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8650.

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Former 'White House Boy' puts story of horrific abuse to a polygraph test

For Their Own Good| A Times special report By Ben Montgomery, Times Staff Writer In Print: Friday, July 3, 2009  

Jerry Cooper has always lived an insult away from assault. He has been cuffed in parking lots, chained inside jail cells, ordered to anger management classes. He is surprised he has yet to kill a man.

All that meanness started one night in 1960, he says, when he was a 16-year-old ward of the Florida School for Boys in Marianna. A one-armed man dragged him to a building called the White House and hit him 135 times with a leather strap.

Now that man claims it never happened. Even though more than 325 former inmates say they were beaten at the state-run school, the old guard, Troy Tidwell, says he never gave a boy more than a dozen state-sanctioned licks.

"Spankings," he called it.

One of them is lying. Cooper drove from Cape Coral to Tampa on Thursday to prove it isn't him.

• • •

"The purpose of this exam today is to test you on the truthfulness of your experience at the boys school," says Mike Alaiwat, a forensic psychophysiologist.

Jerry Cooper sits facing a blank wall at the base of a tall office building in Tampa. Alaiwat has attached medical devices to Cooper's torso, his arm, his fingertips. The devices measure breathing fluctuations, heart rate and the heat in Cooper's fingertips.

Cooper paid $400 for this test himself. He picked at random Alaiwat, who has nine years in the field.

Polygraph tests aren't typically admissible in court, but Cooper felt like he had to do something. It's been two months since he and other men were featured in a St. Petersburg Times special report, "For Their Own Good." The civil lawsuit the men filed against Tidwell and several state departments is lumbering along. An FDLE investigation into the Florida School for Boys, now called the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, hasn't turned up much. Criminal charges against the aging former guards appear unlikely. And Jerry Cooper can't sit still and just take it.

Alaiwat will ask Cooper a series of questions. Some pertain to the beating while others are innocuous. If Cooper lies, Alaiwat will know because Cooper's heart rate will increase, his breathing will fluctuate or his fingers will sweat.

Cooper has given Alaiwat three questions — the industry standard — in advance. He crafted the questions after watching Troy Tidwell deny beating boys in a deposition in late May, a video he could not watch twice. He has not slept much since he decided to do this four days ago. His wife waits in the lobby.

Question 1: "Did Troy Tidwell give you more than 30 lashes that night he thought you had information on a runner?"

Cooper remembers that night. He was 15. He'd been sent to the school after police caught him riding in a stolen car with an AWOL Marine. Things were okay for the first few weeks.

That night, he was sleeping in Roosevelt Cottage when two men woke him up.

What do you know about a runner? one man asked.

I don't know anything about a runner, Cooper replied.

Liar.

He was dragged in his white nightgown to the White House, forced down on a bloody mattress and told to grab the bed rail. Someone shoved Cooper's nightgown between his legs.

Then he heard a strap cut the air.

"Yes," Cooper replies.

Question 2: "Did Mr. Tidwell and two other staff give you more than 100 lashes that night at the White House?"

That first lick lifted him off the spring mattress, and they kept coming.

Cooper played quarterback on the football team and put up with a mean stepfather. He knew how to deal with pain.

You're nothing but a g- - - - - - - - liar! the man said and he slapped Cooper's face. Cooper scrambled, trying to flee. The men forced him down. One punched him in the mouth. Another mashed his toe.

Another man took the strap. When he tired, another. The boy waiting in another room counted to 135.

"Yes," Cooper says.

Question 3: "Were you told to wrap towels around your body that night to keep blood off your mattress?"

Cooper woke up on the floorboard of a state car. His thighs and buttocks were swollen. His nightgown was splattered red. He had trouble walking.

His cottage father escorted him inside and told him to put Vaseline on his injuries and to wrap two towels around his waist and tie them in place with a sheet.

The next morning, he peeled the towels off and backed toward the mirror. His rear was black and crusted. He swore he'd never let anyone hurt him again.

"Yes," Cooper says.

• • •

When the test is over, Cooper is crying. His hands shake in front of his face.

"I'm sorry," he says. "This isn't me.

"Could you tell my wife to come in?"

Babbs Cooper knew this would be hard. She has lived with his anger for 28 years.

"I walk 10 steps behind him," she says.

She wasn't sure he should come. No one asked him to do this. She knew the lawyers were apprehensive.

And what if he failed?

She saw how mad her husband grew when he watched Tidwell deny beating the boys, even though so many of them told the same story.

How could the old man not show some mercy and tell the truth? she wondered.

She sees her husband in the corner and rushes to him. She holds his head as he sobs.

"I passed," he says. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."

"It's okay," she says. "It's okay."

Alaiwat closes his computer.

"There was no deception indicated," he says. "It appears that Mr. Cooper is being truthful regarding his experience with Mr. Tidwell and other staff in the White House at the Florida School for Boys."

Outside, Cooper lights a cigarette. The man who still bears the scars from his beating says he feels great. He says he'd like to challenge Troy Tidwell to take a polygraph test.

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8650.

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HERE ARE ARTICLES ATTRIBUTED TO THE ST. PETE TIMES SERIES "FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.  THESE STORIES TELL THE HISTORY OF THE HORRORS AT FLORIDA SCHOOL FOR BOYS (DOZIER)


READ THE COMPLETE ST PETE TIMES SERIES: "FOR THEIR OWN GOOD" BY CLICKING HERE:

CLICK ON THE BLUE WORDS TO READ EACH ARTICLE

Men, Women and Children in the Stockade: How the People, the Press, and the Elected Officials of Florida Built a Prison System
by Anne Haw Holt

FROM JACKSONVILLE TIMES-UNION

These are the stories of former inmates and staff at the Florida Industrial School for Boys, presented as an ongoing series.

Part 1: 'Why did you cause me to turn out this way?'
Three Jacksonville men tell of the abuse they suffered at the Florida Industrial School for Boys and the bitter lives they led afterward.

Part 2: Beatings weren't unusual at the school A former superintendent, another staff member and two former inmates recall an era when corporal punishment was accepted and applied at the school.

Part 3: The death of a boy named Billy
A Jacksonville man recalls the chilling tale of a burying a younger buddy who kept running, kept getting caught and kept getting beaten before he died.

Part 4: FDLE: Documented deaths at reform school graveyard give no indication of abuse
Authorities did not interview Jacksonville man who tells about burying beaten friend.