Opinion

Probe of boys school abuse shameful

FLORENCE SNYDER
Published: February 13, 2013

Decades of "Law and Order" and "CSI" have conditioned the most cynical Floridians to view our top cops as elite squads of avenging angels who pursue truth and justice with the aid of state-of-the-art technology. On television, no cold case is too cold, and no victim is too "unimportant." But things are different at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

The FDLE's indifference to the generations of victims of the Arthur Dozier School for Boys is a national embarrassment, and a black eye to the Florida Cabinet, which appears unable to make the agency do its job.

In 2008, a series of news reports exposed the state's "reform school" in Marianna for the gulag that it has been since it opened in 1900. Generations of boys, some as young as 6, were "reformed" to the point of death by sadistic guards using sticks and sodomy.

As the bad press piled up, then-Gov. Charlie Crist dispatched the FDLE to the crime scene with orders to find out what had happened at Dozier. More than a year later, the state's Sherlocks completed an investigation so half-baked it missed 13 deaths and 19 graves.

We know that, because a team of anthropologists, biologists and archaeologists from the University of South Florida undertook to "preserve the records, inventory historic buildings, find the graves, identify the forgotten remains, protect the historic cemetery and open it to families … It's a humanitarian effort," Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist and assistant professor at USF said last May. "I hope for those families that have questions and are looking for information, that this will begin to give them some of the information and history they're looking for."

Barney Fife would be ashamed to be out-policed by a bunch of professors, but FDLE blew off USF's findings, citing, but not explaining, "the differing natures of criminal investigations and anthropological research."

U.S. Senator Bill Nelson has asked state officials to find out how the Dozier boys died and at whose hands. If they don't, the U.S. Department of Justice should step in. The dead and walking wounded of Dozier are special victims from central casting. We owe them a Benson and Stabler.

Florence Snyder is a Tallahassee-based corporate lawyer.