The secrets of a brutal Florida school for boys are finally being exposed. It, it's an ugly story
that's a decades, it's decades old about death and abuse that occurred at Dozier School. You know,
it's hard to get your arms around this because it, it's, it really started happening in the
19 hundreds where we knew, early reports, we already knew that these kids that were being
sent to reform school for things like smoking, for running away from, from homes that were awful
to, to try to get away and have a life on their own. The things they were sending 'em to reform
school. It wasn't crimes. There were some crimes, but it wasn't the kind of thing you would think
about. So Dozier rises up out of that. Pick it up. Yeah. You have this school in this small little
town in Florida, you know, it's a drive through town. Nobody pays attention to it.
Marianna. Marianna right outside the
capital and starting in, in 1900 I think, late 18 hundreds possibly, Dozier School pops up.
Mm-hmm. And they say,
well, send us your troubled boys. We got a lot of troubled boys around these parts all through
the state. Send them here. We're gonna take care of 'em. We're gonna put 'em on the right path.
Well, the right path led to a little building on that property that they called the White House. It
was painted all white. And in that room is where torture, I mean, no other way to describe it other
than torture took place. They would drag these boys out of their, you know, dorm room sometimes
in the middle of the night, take 'em over to the White House and beat them mercilessly.
Mm-hmm. I mean, those are
the stories that the people who were there have told, and sometimes worse than just beatings.
Well, this quote, this is, there's been some great reporting on this but there hasn't been enough.
No. Not enough. You know, it's,
I call this, it, it's a, the shelf life on this should be endless because it's not just,
it's not just Marianna Florida where this is taking place. But this is from one of
the people that I actually interviewed, you know, the man just went through absolute hell. He said,
the first blow lifted me a foot and a half off the bed. And every time,
and every strap would come down, you'd hear the shuffle on the concrete because their shoes would
slide as they put as much force as they can behind it. And you could hear the swoosh, swoosh, bam,
bam. The same person reported that he saw one of, one of the kids there that was beaten to death,
put in a tub after he was beaten to death. And then where the story gets really, really bizarre
is they would call the parents and say, you know, your, your child got sick and we had,
we had to, we had to bury him because he died. And so the, the point is, they, they could only find,
they could only find places where they buried 31 kids, but they know that there's far more buried
all over that grounds. And there's no records to even show it. Because they understood, if we can,
if we can get away with this, we can do it quietly. Nobody's gonna know about it. These
were kids, they were farming out to the community. Farmers would hire 'em for nothing. They'd go
out and work all day long, come back and. And Dozier school would get the money for
basically having this forced labor. They'd come back and they'd get the hell eaten out of 'em for
any minor, real or not, infraction. And, and, and what really is concerning here is we still don't
know how many bodies are buried. Mm-hmm.
They're having to use this specialized equipment sending, you know, the,
the sound waves through the ground to find anything that may look like they, you know,
a body underground. It, it's horrifying what they're having to do. And, and here's what's
even more disgusting. Couple years ago, I think a little over 10 years ago when Charlie Crist was
our governor, they finally looked into the Dozier school, had been going on for a hundred years.
And Crist looks at it and his government says, hey, you know what? There's nothing we can do.
Yeah. You know, we're just,
we're just gonna let it be. It said, the state report found no evidence indicating a staff
member was responsible for any student deaths. Yeah. You know what, that was the FDLA report,
Charlie paid for it. I went to law school with Charlie. He's, you know, he's a capable lawyer.
He could have read the report the same way I did. It was, it was a useless report. All you had to do
is read between the lines. That the interviews that were, where some of the boys said this is
what happened. They were, they were cut out. There was no questions, why did you cut that
out? Why did you cut out the fact that the, the story after story where they say we're,
we're pulled into, into the White House, they bind our feet, we're raped, we're beaten,
and we're buried. Now how do you have all of these stories out there that I know they told,
because we've talked to 'em, they told these stories to the FDLA. Charlie looks at it and says,
well, what the hell? I mean, I don't see anything here. It was just an absolute cop out, wasn't it?
It, it really was. And so what we have right here is this, these failures across the board,
you know, past government, current government, the law enforcement officials, the law enforcement
oversight, they all knew this was happening. They did nothing about it because even though,
you know, this, this ended, you know, a couple decades ago, they don't wanna get into it now
because then it opens up this new can of worms. We gotta investigate the current law
enforcement. Maybe this is gonna make other states look into what's happening today.
Here's the good news. The good news. The good news is that we've talked to some of the legislators
who knew nothing about it. They weren't the idiots that came up with the idea, hey,
let's put a plaque. The plaque is about this big, and it's on the wall. It's on the outside wall of
the White House where all this beating and rape and horrible things took place. And it says, we're
sorry. You know, we're really sorry. And you know, the, the thing to me that is the most agonizing is
how the community let this happen. How the, we're talking about Marianna Florida. I mean, there's
what one red light there. And to say we didn't know what was going on is just reprehensible to
me. It reminds me, I, I don't know if you've ever traveled, you go to a place like Auschwitz and
Auschwitz or Dachau and Dachau's in this little village and in the middle of the village are these
big smokestacks and, you know, where people are being murdered and burned, burned alive
sometimes. And the community says, oh, we didn't know anything about that. It's just, I don't
know what it, whether it's some type of peculiar social event that takes place where, where it's
just absolutely people are willing to put their head in the sand and ignore it. But that happened
here. The rest of this story is that this is going on in other places in the country. If you take a
look at what's going on in Louisiana, I took a look at the New York Times story on what's
happening in Louisiana. Very, very well done story talking about these kids committing suicide,
like three suicides back to back because they are in a Dozier kind of school. It's not just,
it's not just Louisiana, it's not just Florida. It's all over this country. And my goal is to
try to get lawyers to pay attention to that and shut these places down. Thank you, Farron.
Thank you. That's all for this week. But all of these
segments are gonna be available this coming week right here on this channel. And you can follow us
on Twitter @AmericasLawyer. I'm Mike Papantonio and this has been America's Lawyer, where every
week we tell you stories that corporate media won't tell you because their advertisers don't
let 'em, or their political connections just don't allow for it. We'll see you next week.