First remains identified among 55 bodies found at notorious FL reform school
Source: Reuters
George Owen Smith, a 14-year-old caught with an older boy in a stolen car, was sent in 1940 to a reform school in the Florida Panhandle, never to be seen again by his family.
His remains became the first to be identified among 55 bodies dug up from unmarked graves last year on the campus of the Dozier School for Boys, the University of South Florida announced on Thursday.
The school, infamous for accounts of brutality told by former inmates, was closed by the state in 2011.
“It feels pretty good, really after 73 years. It’s a feeling of relief,” Ovell Krell, 85, Smith’s younger sister, told Reuters on receiving confirmation of his whereabouts.
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Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/08/first-remains-identified-among-55-bodies-found-at-notorious-fl-reform-school/
= new reply since forum marked as read
From 2009
But investigators did not talk to several people who claim to have knowledge of suspicious deaths. They did not talk to Roger Kiser, a founder of the White House Boys, the group featured in the Times report. They didn't talk to Johnnie Walthour, a 73-year-old Jacksonville man who told the Florida Times-Union a friend died after a beating in the early 1950s.
And they did not talk to Ovell Krell.
EDMUND D. FOUNTAIN | Times
Ovell Krell’s brother George Owen Smith was sent to the Florida School for Boys in the 1940s. He never made it home. Krell, 80, believes Owen was shot by guards as he tried to escape. Ovell Smith is Ovell Krell now. She was a Lakeland police officer for two decades, one of the first female officers in Florida. She still doesn't understand what happened to her brother. Why would he crawl under a house? Why would he not come out, even if he were stg (?) or ill? Why would a 14-year-old boy just lay down and die?
Frances Smith wrote to the school's superintendent, Millard Davidson, in December of 1940, asking about her son. Davidson wrote back saying no one knew where Owen was.
"So far we have been unable to get any information concerning his whereabouts,'' said his letter, dated Jan. 1, 1941. She wrote back, telling him she would be at the school in two days to search for her son.
That letter apparently arrived in Marianna around Jan. 23, 1941. That's when the Smiths heard the news from an Episcopal priest in Auburndale. He was apologetic. Said the school had found Owen. A friend drove them to Marianna. The school's superintendent told the family that Owen's remains were found under a house in Marianna. They identified him by his dental records and the markings on his laundry.
The superintendent led the family through the woods to a clearing, to a patch of fresh-turned earth.
I really feel for those medical pathologists. A horrific task done with honor and justice for the victims...
