Posted on 12/22/2016 11:47:10 AM PST by Pontiac
For more than a century, boys were sent to the Florida School for Boys reformatory in the north Florida town of Marianna. Many were beaten brutally and bear the physical and psychological scars to this day. Many boys, though, never came home. They died, some under mysterious circumstances. They were buried in unmarked graves and they were forgotten. Several years ago, a young anthropology professor from the University of South Florida decided she would try to answer the many questions about what happened to these boys and, if she could, return their remains to their families. To get to the truth she would have to fight.
(Excerpt) Read more at tampabay.com ...
Is this fake news? The dailymail site has a GPR product that purportedly shows grave sites at the school with high returns. That is unlikely unless the corpses were buried in metal casks a la military graveyards. GPR will not get a return on an organically decomposed body and only a slight return on a wooden cask.
Very horrible story to even imagine. Discovery ID Channel had a show specifically on that issue last year, I think. Might have been on one of the “A Crime To Remember” episodes, but they have numerous shows that could have presented it.
Definitely written from a point of view.
The point of view is that western civilization is bad.
I would have liked to see much more context, the total number of boys, perhaps testimony from a former guard.
Lots of suppositions about evil deeds by the staff of the place.
It is very difficult to know just what happened after several decades, We can be pretty sure that most of the boys were not stellar citizens.
The article would be more credible if had some information from the other side.
No doubt bad things happened. Very likely crimes were committed. But most of what we are told is supposed, or what people thought might have happened.
GPR will show disturbed soil. It will indicate that dirt was removed and replaced. The density of the soil and its composition has changed and this will show up.
The disturbed soil is over disturbed dead guys.
There are fairly large number of men that come forward that are former inmates at the 'school' that tell detailed stories of abuse at the hands of specific guards. These men could be call witnesses. Witnesses to crimes.
Not all of the boys were delinquents. Some were termed incorrigibles. Some were runaways.
So if you are looking for a more balanced investigation of this unsavory bit of history I don't know where you are going to find it.
Dead kids. Some as young as five.
True story, unfortunately. I saw a documentary about this a few years ago on youtube, with survivors interviewed, and read about this horrific tragic tale.
We are looking at things that happened from about 1916 to 1970, it appears.
I do not doubt that some bad things happened. There wasn’t much oversight of reformatories before about 1970.
I read both articles, but I had to go to a third link to discover some meat in investigations done in the 50’s
The author went to a lot of trouble to track down people with stories of abuse.
I would have liked to see an interview explaining what problems the staff had, and how they attempted to deal with them, for example.
It sounds like a pretty bad place, but I would still like to know how many boys went through the place. 10,000? 100,000? I did not see that article anywhere.
Considering they have already dug up the cemetery and found human remains, I think we can be pretty certain it’s not “fake”.
“Lots of suppositions about evil deeds by the staff of the place.”
Testimony from multiple victims is “supposition” since when exactly?
There were references to people who supposed something had happened other than what was reported.
Here is one:
“But Glen Varnadoe, Thomas’ nephew, had a theory on how Thomas died, and it didn’t involve pneumonia. “I believe he was beaten to death.” Glen said.”
Might be true, might not, but it is a supposition.
Here is another, of a buy who died in his own home after running away from the reformatory:
“His family remembered that authorities said he shot himself with a 12-gauge shotgun, found nearby, but they think he was killed by somebody looking for him.”
They may have been right, maybe not.
When I read the articles from the Tampay Bay Times, I missed much of the first article, because of the way they are displayed. The two quotes above are from the second article. The first article is where hundreds of former reformatory residents told stories of being beaten.
Stories from multiple victims over several decades is not supposition. It is first hand information, but it is far from testimony in a court of law. Those with the stories certainly have an axe to grind.
In 1918 with a population of 220 inmates, 11 died of influenza during the influenza epidemic that was world wide. 8 dide in a fire in 1914. There were records for 98 deaths
The school existed for 110 years. A lot of that happened when the country was far, far poorer than it is now.
I do not know how many people passed through this institution. But in 1918 it had a population of 220. It appears the population grew significantly.
Say 220 times 100 years. That would be 22,000 residents as a very rough estimate.
We have a strong victim mentality in this country. Some of the locals were indignant about the charges. It is very easy to make claims about mistreatment from 50 years ago.
My suspicion is that there was a fair amount of abuse in those sort of institutions 50 and a hundred years ago.
If you look all around the world, you see it happens. The poorer the country, the worse the abuse.
Careful record keeping, multiple, frequent inspections, lawyers assigned to each case, all these things cost scarce resources.
I do not doubt that there were abuses. But the amount of abuse, taken over more than a century, is probably not too far from the norm for such institutions at the time.
The proper comparison is to other institutions at the time, performing the same functions.
What we see is a comparison with perfection.
It is what the left does. They demand utopia. Utopia is not an option.
This whole series of articles is written in tear-jerker mode to make Western Civilization look bad.
In fact, we did more, and faster, than nearly every other country in the world, to limit these sorts of abuses.
That fact is never brought forth in the article, and it should be. That would be some balance and historical perspective.
Here is another view by a local historian and author:
“The remains were dug up over the objections of a circuit judge, the state archaeologist and Florida’s Secretary of State in a frenzy of publicity that was often generated by the university’s own media experts. Despite claims by former students that hundreds of bodies would be found in multiple cemeteries on the campus of the former reform school in Marianna, the only remains located were buried in coffins in a 75’ by 100’ area of the known cemetery. All were buried in coffins according to religious and mortuary standards of the early 20th century.
University researchers noted in a report to the Florida Cabinet earlier this year that they had found no evidence of crimes involving the graves.”
http://www.jacksoncountytimes.net/local-news/itemlist/user/2051-dale-cox.html
Here is the local historian and author complaining about the media coverage of the Dozier school.
It sounds a lot like many other stories we read in the Establishment media. (video)
http://www.jcfloridan.com/video_6d55445c-ab39-11e3-bf64-001a4bcf6878.html
My point is graves do not look like that on a GPR image. What is your experience scanning cemeteries? Decomposed carbon matter will not get you a return!
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I'm an Archaeological Steward with the Texas Historical Commission, and have worked with GPR in the field.
You have zero idea as to how GPR functions.
The usable data from GPR in a burial context is its ability to discriminate between dense, undisturbed soil, and the looser, less dense, mixed soil in an area that has been dug and re-filled. IOW, it provides a usable image of the backfilled grave, itself.
Try RTFA. It describes GPR results, but not exactly as I have done.
Since they’ve already dug and found bodies in those graves, your protests are academic.
I'm sure there were bodies buried there, but the analysis given is flawed IMO!
“The graves that were marked are likely real.”
You realize there were originally no markers in that field at all and the pipe crosses were put up decades later by people who really had no idea exactly where the burials were, right?
That doesn’t make any sense. Again, organic compounds such as decomposed bodies and skeletons give minimal returns. Most likely tell of a casketless dead body is from a large piece of jewelry or weapon buried with the corpse. Skeletons may give slight returns that are virtually undetectable. You can analyse returns to see where soil has been dug and filled in, but the posted product has strong returns in a random manner that were unlikely graves. I’ve scanned many cemeteries and only have seen returns from coffins. If the bodies were reburied in steel coffins a la US military cemeteries in Europe, yes, that would look similar to the posted GPR product. I Never heard of even a makeshift cemetery with random crosses, even in makeshift battlefield burial grounds, but there is a possibility that at some point the bodies were exhumed and reinterred in stainless steel. 10 times out of 10 that is done in a dress right dress manner...not random! BTW, the term “6 feet under” come from the government burial standard for military graves. Of course the caskets move over time and some of them surface, hence why I was scanning the cemeteries on behalf of the US government and my expertise.
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