Ex-Florida school focus of graves search
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A forensic anthropologist is returning to the Florida panhandle today to look for more bodies on the grounds of a former reform school known for horrific abuse.
Dr. Erin Kimmerle of the University of South Florida will travel to the former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, where the remains of 55 people were unearthed after the state shut its doors in 2011.
Kimmerle spent four years researching and unearthing the remains of boys buried on the grounds of the reform school in Marianna, about 60 miles northwest of Tallahassee. The site covers 1,400 acres — more than 2 square miles.
She’ll lead a team on a mission to see if 27 anomalies discovered by a contractor using ground-penetrating radar on the site are human graves.
“At the end of a couple of weeks we’ll have a real good sense of what’s going on and hopefully that will provide some clarity. There are a lot of people really invested in that history and the men and boys who were there. It will be nice to give them some answers,” Kimmerle said in a phone interview Friday.
There could be a lot of explanations for the anomalies. During their four years of research, ending in 2016, Kimmerle’s team identified 55 human graves at the school’s Boot Hill grave sites. But they unearthed a lot more than human remains.
“It could be tree roots, root balls or buried garbage, trash or animals,” she said. “Even what we found at Boot Hill with that burial ground, is there was still a lot of both historic and modern buried trash and syringes and buried animals. There was a lot of that mixed into the site. So that wouldn’t surprise me. I’m kind of expecting to find a mix of things.”
The anomalies were found across the road from the site of a barn and pasture that where part of a working farm the reform school operated decades ago, so there could be farm animals buried there, she said.
The reform school opened in 1900. It later became known for decades of abuse, including beatings, torture and rape, and the state opened an investigation into the facility’s past in 2009, two years before the school was closed.
The Florida Legislature voted overwhelmingly two years ago to apologize for the abuse, and many of the survivors gathered at the Capitol for the vote. The school was founded by the Legislature as the Florida State Reform School, and was renamed for a former superintendent in the 1960s.
Kimmerle’s team previously extended its search far beyond the Boot Hill graves, about 30 of which were marked with plain, white iron crosses with no explanation of who was buried beneath them. They examined historical photos to see what areas of the school, now overgrown with trees and brush, were once open fields. They researched records on deaths that occurred at the school. There were nearly 100.
Records show that some of the boys’ bodies were shipped back home, but that wasn’t necessarily accurate. Kimmerle noted that records show one boy was buried in Philadelphia, but when researchers checked the grave there, it was empty.
If any of the newly discovered anomalies turn out to be human remains, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and a medical examiner would be called. A full excavation of the site wouldn’t happen until authorities had a chance to investigate the findings.
Kimmerle said that if the anomalies are human remains, the pattern of their placement suggests they were clandestine burials, meaning the sites were chosen in hopes that nobody would find them.