JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – When Michael Bell was 15 years old, he spent four months at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna.
Bell, who was executed on Tuesday for the double murder of 18-year-old Tamecka Smith and 23-year-old Jimmy West outside the Moncrief Liquors and Lounge, said while he was there, guards forced him to fight much larger boys and took cash bets from other Dozier employees on whether he would win. They threw him face down on a cot in a squat building everyone called “the white house” and told him to grasp the headrail, while beating him with a leather strap until he bled, he said.
According to a review by The Marshall Project, Bell is among at least 34 boys who stayed at Dozier and another 16 sent to Okeechobee — a separate boys’ school with a troubled history — who ended up on Florida’s death row. Combined, The Marshall Project found men who attended Dozier and Okeechobee have killed at least 114 people.
News4JAX interviewed the reporter of the story, Leonora Lapeter Anton, on Wednesday. (Watch her full interview in the video player above)
Anton said she contacted several people who’d been at the facility with Bell, who corroborated what he said.
In recent years, hundreds of men have come forward to recount brutal beatings, sexual assaults, deaths and disappearances at the notorious Dozier school in the panhandle town.
Florida lawmakers formally apologized for the horrors the men endured as children.
At its peak in the Jim Crow 1960s, 500 boys were housed at what is now known as the Dozier School for Boys, most of them for minor offenses such as petty theft, truancy or running away from home. Orphaned and abandoned children were also sent to the school, which was open for more than a century.
Nearly 100 boys died between 1900 and 1973 at Dozier, some of them from gunshot wounds or blunt force trauma. Some of the boys’ bodies were shipped back home. Others were buried in unmarked graves that researchers only recently uncovered.
Ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline, the state of Florida received more than 800 applications for restitution from people held at the Dozier school and its sister school in Okeechobee, Florida, attesting to the mental, physical and sexual abuse they endured at the hands of school personnel. Last year, state lawmakers allocated $20 million to be equally divided among the schools’ surviving victims.
In its report published on Monday, The Marshall Project, an American nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, raised a question: Did abuse at the facility make the people who went there more violent? Would Michael Bell not have murdered if he had been treated well at Dozier? Would he have gone on to be a productive citizen?
Experts Anton spoke with said most people who are tormented in childhood do not become murderers, and it can be difficult to know why someone commits violence. But research shows that childhood and adolescent abuse does affect brain development and can make people more violent.
“Dozier cannot be attributed to all the violence,” Anton said. “There was violence in their youth. There was, you know, violence on the streets of Jacksonville in Michael’s case. And all those things compounded is what creates the damage in the brain. Basically, you have myelin or a brain matter covering your brain connections and when you have trauma, severe trauma, it can just wipe out those connections, like stop the connections from growing, and it can actually alter neural pathways in your brain, is what experts told me.
“So it does affect, but we don’t know how much. We can’t say that Dozier caused that violence.”
But Bell’s 73-year-old aunt, Paula Goins, who worked 35 years for a federal court, said the experience changed him.
She brought up Dozier in her recent testimony in Duval County court as Bell’s lawyers tried to halt the execution.
“I know Michael has never been the same since that Dozier school,” Goins testified. “That boy came back home damaged.”
