Florida Investigates Graves at Boys School

Dec. 10, 2008— -- There are secrets hidden at the Florida State Reform School.

One day in the late 1950s, Richard Colon was working in the school's laundry room. After a long bathroom break, Colon, then a student inmate in his early teens, said he returned and found the room empty and quiet, except for one tumble dryer that was running.

A young boy had been shoved into it, he said.

"I looked around and I thought 'I could help him, but if I do, what will they do to me?'" he said, assuming the boy had been forced into the dryer as punishment. "So I left him. And he died."

"I think about him every day," said Colon, now 65 and living in Baltimore. "I think to myself, I could have opened that door and I didn't. That torments me."

Colon says he does not know what happened to the boy's body or who forced him into the dryer. But he and a group of men who were students at the school during the 1950s and 1960s believe his remains may be buried among 32 unmarked graves recently discovered near the school, where they suspect boys who were killed at the school were dumped.

Their claims, kept hidden for more than 50 years, prompted Florida Gov. Charlie Crist on Tuesday to order the state Department of Law Enforcement to investigate the four neat rows of white crosses in Marianna near the area where the once segregated school used to house black inmates.

The men, now in their 60s, call themselves the "White House Boys," a name taken from the small, white cinder-block building where they say they were beaten repeatedly with a leather strap lined with sheet metal. Others say they were sexually abused while at the school.

"The beatings were ungodly. I thought they were going to kill me," said Roger Kiser, who said he was sent to the reform school from an orphanage in late 1958. "They would beat you for anything."

Officials at the school, now known as the Arthur Dozier School for Boys, and the state Department of Juvenile Justice have not disputed that some abuse took place and recently dedicated a memorial to the White House Boys.