Decades Of Death & Abuse Exposed At Florida Dozier School For Boys

The secrets of a brutal Florida school for boys is finally being exposed, decades after the death and abuse occurred. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

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.