Historic Justice: Investigating Cruelty and Death at Florida’s Dozier School for Boys

Episode Notes

Transcript

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Hello everyone and welcome to the CBAs @theBar podcast where we have unscripted conversations with our guests about legal news, topics, stories, and whatever else strikes our fancy. I’m your host Maggie Mendenhall-Casey of the city of Chicago’s Law Department, and joining us as a guest today is Erin Kimmerle. Erin is a forensic anthropologist artist and executive director of the Institute of Forensic Anthropology and Applied Science at the University of South Florida. She was awarded the 2020 a s Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. In 2001, she worked for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Her work on the United Nations team included human identification, trauma analysis, and mass grave excavation. She later worked in Peru, Bermuda and Nigeria, where she helped locate mass graves, identified unknown victims and conducted research on human identification methods. Erin, I am so excited to talk with you today.

Erin Kimmerle:

Well, thank you for having me.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

I’m honored that you join The Dozer School of Florida Juvenile Institution opened in 1900 and finally closed in 2011. After over a century of cruelty, abuse and unexplained deaths, Pulitzer Prize winning Arthur Colson Whitehead documented the fictional story of the Dozer school. In his 2019 novel Nickel Boys in 2024, nickel Boys was adapted into an Oscar nominated movie. Our guest Aaron investigated the graveyard on dozer school grounds to determine the accurate number of graves and help reunite families with their boys’ remains. Erin documented her successful investigation in a 2022 book called We Carry Their Bones, the Search for Justice at the Dozer School for Boys. Erin, do you want to tell us about what the Dozer School of Boys is or was? Sure.

Erin Kimmerle:

This was an institution created by the state of Florida in 1900, and at the time it was boys and girls who were convicted of crimes Florida, like much of the South didn’t have prisons. They had a convict lease system, and so it was this idea to get children out of the convict lease system and give them education, maybe some life skills, but turn them into good citizens that could return to the community. The town Marianna, which is up in north Florida, competed with a few other towns to get the school in their location, and they donated 1400 acres and about $500 to help get the school started. And I just point out girls were there until 1914 and then they were moved to a separate facility. So we tend to talk about most of its history and think about it as just a boys school, but those early years did also have girls there.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

When you talk about a number of different communities and towns competing for the school, why would there be competition for this school?

Erin Kimmerle:

That’s a great question, and that was really one of the first questions I had is I thought, man, how many children are in state custody that you need 1400 acres? It’s a really big facility, but it was interesting that the men who fought to get the school in their town were a lot of the same labor bosses who ran convict lease programs. And so of course, it was about setting up not just a school really, the school was about the last thing they were interested in. It was about setting up all kinds of industry and using the boys and girls for labor, and that meant hiring them out, whether it was for agriculture, cotton, oranges, cutting lumber, the school had built its own brick manufacturing plant, so they produced over 20,000 bricks a day. They did all of the printing for the state of Florida for decades, and so it really became this big enterprise, and you can imagine that to make all that work and make it profitable, they needed a lot of boys there and for a lot of time. And so one of the things that I really found interesting just right off the bat when we started digging into some of the historic records was how hard school officials lobbied for legislative reform in order to incarcerate more children, make their sentences longer, and basically turn a lot of what would be non-criminal offenses into crimes. So that’s how you then get five year olds convicted of incorrigibility, truancy, things like that by a court. And so you see the population really explode and in those years, disproportionate number to black boys that are being sent there.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

You talked about how the dozer school spawned from convict lease and convict labor system. The convict labor system is also a vestige of slavery. Is that right?

Erin Kimmerle:

That’s correct, yeah. It’s basically in that post civil war period of time, 1860s, seventies through the early 19 hundreds where you see all kinds of laws become enacted that enable local sheriffs to pick up men, predominantly black men, not exclusively, but predominantly for all kinds of things. You see all these vagabond laws, sundown laws, it’s kind of the beginning of a lot of the Jim Crow laws, and it’s really an effort to incarcerate more men to get them into the labor system.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

As a part of your research, you went to the town that housed the dozer school and you were there for a significant amount of time. Can you tell us a little bit about what your interaction with the locals was like?

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah, I guess, let me explain it this way. The very first time I went up to Marianna, I went alone. I drove up there, was going to spend two nights because it’s about a five hour drive from where we are in Tampa. And I met with the local sheriff. We do a lot of, in my normal forensic casework, we do a lot of work with local law enforcement. And so I wanted to let him know what we were doing, invite him and his staff to participate if a lot of times they’ll use it as a training opportunity, et cetera. And so I went up there with this sort of very open, transparent, this is what we’re doing and why, and we hope to collaborate. And over the course of several years, but it didn’t take long where it became really apparent that there were a lot of people in the community who were very much opposed to the work that we were doing. And I would say multiple communities, right? So the local power structure, a lot of the families who had to send their daddies or granddaddies their great granddaddies had worked at the school, I think felt this sort of need, if you will, to sort of protect that reputation. But the African-American community, the younger generation said, why would you oppose this, right? This is history. Let’s just understand it. And so we did get a lot of pushback and I give that story about driving up there alone because I never went up there alone. After that,

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Your feelers were up, and you talked a little bit in the book about how there would be some times people who came up to you clandestinely, they’d make a bunch of noise in the restaurant, I’ll look at this person, they’re doing the wrong thing, and then whisper to you, I support. So what brought you to the town of Marianna and to investigate the dozer school for boys?

Erin Kimmerle:

So many Floridians at the time, I was kind of reading about what was happening at that school in the local newspaper, a reporter Ben Montgomery had been doing all kinds of investigative work because at the time the school was still open and still had a lot of problems, really high recidivism rate. And so he was doing all kinds of stories about that. And I just thought, how strange, I’ve never heard of this, never heard of this school before. Is this really, is this real that this really happened? And through the course of his work, he had brought, a lot of families reached out and came forward that had lost their brothers or uncles, and those boys had been buried at the school. The families were told after the fact and they had been searching for them and they’d been searching for decades. It’s not as if just suddenly one day everybody came out of the woodwork.

They had been asking, going up there, searching and just always told, no, nothing happened. It’s impossible. The graves are unmarked, so there’s nothing we can do. The investigative work that Ben was doing contributed in part to an investigation that the state did in 2008, 2009, sort of looking into all the allegations because many men had come forward who’d been there in the fifties and sixties with abuse allegations, physical and sexual abuse, and then of course the family saying, Hey, our brothers were killed here. And so the state did this investigation and basically long story short concluded, nothing really bad ever happened, nothing that could be proved. They took a very sort of conservative perspective on criminal law and statute of limitations ran out. Bad guys are dead, raping a child under 12 wasn’t a crime in 1961, therefore we can’t hold anyone accountable and just really dismissed it. But you can imagine that for victims and families, that’s not a good resolution because

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

All it’s not satisfying

Erin Kimmerle:

All’s not that they want at all. No, they want acknowledgement. They want answers, they want truth. They want to just know what happened and have it acknowledged. And that’s where we tried to change the dialogue and talk about justice comes in different forms and sometimes truth is justice or sometimes maybe we can talk about restorative justice or just different ways to think about it than the one criminal model that’s clearly not going to work.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

So you’re just talking about the framing of social justice versus an criminal investigation or initiative. Can you tell us a little bit more about the distinction between being a forensic anthropologist and what we think of as a evidence technician or somebody that we would see on CSI? What’s the distinction between someone that’s looking for social justice and someone that is looking for criminal prosecution?

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So forensic anthropologists we’re anthropologists first and foremost in our training and apply those methods and tools to medical-legal, death investigations. So we’ll get called into let’s say a modern homicide investigation where the victim’s unknown or buried in a clandestine grave, something that requires sort of anthropological skills for either human identification or understanding injuries. There’s just bones and why are these bones broken and what’s the cause of death? So we get involved in that way, but we also do more historic projects, and this project really fell between those lines because it wasn’t being investigated by local law enforcement as a criminal case, that would’ve been one avenue, but because it wasn’t, they weren’t interested in that. I took it on really as a historic research project and said, this is one of these examples of a historic justice issue where it doesn’t really fit in any of our boxes, but there’s living victims. It’s not ancient history that we’re putting together. And so there’s men who were there and we’re abused. There’s families who’ve been asking for answers, and we have the ability through science today to do a lot to help them. I mean, we can use remote sensing and fine burials. We can use DNA and test remains and make connections. So those things weren’t available in 1940, but they’re available today and why not try it? And that was the approach that we took.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

It sounds like framing it as a social justice initiative allowed the families, the victims, to have more agency over the process when it’s a criminal investigation, those charges are brought by the prosecutor and their agents and they have the decision about who’s going to be charged. The law enforcement has a decision about who’s going to be investigated, but when it’s framed as a social justice initiative, people can band together. They can retain experts like you who are interested in making sure that the families get a resolution. Is that correct?

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah, I think that’s perfectly said. That’s exactly what we tried to do is frame it in that way and bring the tools and the science that would be available to prosecutors and police in a criminal case, but make it available to families. Just like in other long-term missing person cases, families are in such a desperate position because there’s nowhere to go, there’s no one 800 the missing, come find my person. And that was to me, what these boys were. In essence, they were essentially missing persons because they went into state custody and they didn’t come back and the state had a responsibility to care for them and at least to account for them, and they had not been doing that. They had never done that. So that’s where we thought we could help and basically just take, do the sort of things that we do every day, but do it for these people who had been denied that access.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

In 1958, the Miami News published a three-part series on the beatings at the school, and then in 1983, the A CLU filed a class action lawsuit for holding boys in solitary confinement. Why do you think that it took until 2011 to close the institution down?

Erin Kimmerle:

I think it was largely because of the school leadership, the town leadership that fought so hard to keep it open. From the first legislative report, which was in 1902, it said children as young as five or chain to the walls, there’s no books, basically. It was not a secret that there were problems at this institution from the beginning. And every time there would be a big headline or scandal or congressional hearing state hearings, it was met with this resistance from the local leadership that provided a completely different narrative, lobbied really hard, and then they would change the name of the school, throw some money rebrand at it. Exactly. They rebranded and they’re doing that. You can see it in 1913, which made me think like, wow, when did people start? When did people first hire press secretaries? I never really thought of that as how hard they would lobby a campaign in these historic cases. And so that’s what you see, and I think now it has a different name and everybody forgets and moves on, and it just keeps repeating because the people didn’t change, the culture didn’t change, nothing else actually changed.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

I think this is a good place for our first break here. Before the break, I heard a little bit about the role that you played in helping to bring light and attention to the tragedy that occurred at this institution. I’d love to hear how you saw your role interacting with or playing with all of the others who helped to bring light to this institution.

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we are able to do, because we approach it as through this sort of scientific model, this scientific perspective, is really bringing together physical evidence, whether it’s historic documents or brown penetrating radar results or actual human remains at the end of the day, the actual number of burials, but really bringing that physical evidence to compliment what everybody’s saying, what all the other narratives and historic records. And I think that’s really powerful tool and way to shed light on something that happened like this. I also think that because we received so much political blow back, local politicians in the area would put a lot of pressure on the governor’s office. They would call the university President weekly. And I really think that

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

For your university

Erin Kimmerle:

To try and shut down our investigation and our research, and the one thing I’m really proud of USF is they stood very strong that this was a matter of academic freedom. And I think that that is what made the difference, both today, but even historically, because there were folks who worked in juvenile justice and reporters and politicians and parents and people who tried to get the school closed or to get reforms, and they also met that political pressure. But I think that what academic freedom is and why it’s so critical, it’s shown in an example, this is that we could go forward without fear of losing our jobs or whatever other sort of measures could be taken. And I think that’s what made the difference.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

That must have been really gratifying to work for an institution that supported your freedom and the integrity of your investigation rather than caving to political pressure.

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah, very much so. Yeah.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

You mentioned the governor at the time, and my understanding was that in 2008, a study commission by then Governor Charlie Chris identified that there were 32 graves on the grounds of the Dozier School. By the time you had concluded your work, how many victims had you located and identified?

Erin Kimmerle:

Through our initial field work, we estimated 50 burials. And then once we did the excavation, we found 55 and we had missed several because they were underneath trees and fences where we were not able to do any testing or remote sensing work. And so it was a big difference. Then the 30 31 that the school had proclaimed had been there and they never kept a log. They didn’t have a list, they didn’t have a plot map. They couldn’t tell you exactly who was there or where, what happened to them. The other thing that the FDLE, that’s the Florida Department of Law Enforcement who did the investigation, they kind of looked at the historic record and said, well, a lot of these children died of the flu. That was very common. Then you had the big flu epidemics. Some of them died in a fire, fires happened back then.

There weren’t really good fire prevention methods, and I understand that, that they’re trying to sort of explain the deaths and what happened. But the other thing we were able to show through our research is that when the flu epidemic occurred, staff abandoned the boys on the black side of campus and they were found several days later without food, electricity, water medicine. And so the argument we tried to make is that there’s a culpability there on the part of the state for their care. So it’s not really like, oh, well everybody was dying of the flu in 1919 when you have children in your custody and then you abandoned them,

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

How were you able to ascertain that the black children were left offend for themselves for days during flu outbreaks?

Erin Kimmerle:

So what happened several days after that was there was a state physician who was sent by members of the legislature who found them, and then he wrote a very detailed report about the conditions he found them in. He never listed all that died. He just said the debt are piling up. And so we relied a lot on his reports and other similar types of reports. So it took a lot of digging through archives to try and find all the different legislative and public materials that we could.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

I want to get a bit into the mechanics of your work. You mentioned ground penetrating radar and how you utilize that to locate some of the unmarked graves. Do you mind telling us a bit more about how you went from having a suspicion that there were more graves to confirming and digging and locating and identifying from there?

Erin Kimmerle:

What we do is kind of approach it from two sides. So one side is the archival research, death certificates, newspaper accounts, legislative reports. Anywhere we can figure out, make a list who died ultimately, I always like to say you have to know who you’re looking for, who was there, who should be buried there theoretically, who are we looking for? And then we approach it through physical groundwork. So ground penetrating radar is one tool. It was really effective. It’s kind of looks like a lawnmower. You push it around in a couple different directions and it gives you, it’s basically sending down a signal that bounces back and when there’s something underground or if the density of the soil is different so that it makes a different reflection, you basically get these waves and data and you interpret that and you can put it together for a whole area. And it’s such to look like graves if it’s the right size and shape, and you interpret that.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

How did you know? Because some people said, oh, it’s a mule down there, it’s a squirrel down there. How did you know that human remains versus animal remains,

Erin Kimmerle:

Right? That’s right. He did say that. Well, I’ll tell you what I told the warden who said that is I said, look, at the end of the day, just from ground penetrating radar, I can’t say who’s buried in the grave. Maybe it is horses or mules. Did they bury their mules in graves in rows? Maybe I’ve never seen that before, but I can’t say they didn’t do it.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Maybe they care for their animals that much,

Erin Kimmerle:

Right? So maybe they did. I mean, as a rational thinking person, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I like to go with the simplest answer is usually correct. That’s not the simple answer, but that’s why we then ground truth it too. Because what we do is we dig very shallow trenches so as to not intrude into a burial, but what we’re looking at is the soil, and that confirms that it is the size and shape and consistency of a grave. Now, it still doesn’t tell you who’s in it, but it does rule out buried trash or something other than graves. But ultimately we did all of that confirmed that these were graves, whether they were children or mules, and the families just kept demanding from the state that they excavate and try to identify. And I really also kind of said, look, if they’re mules, then what’s all the fuss? What do you care? Let us dig ’em up.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

You mentioned that the families assisted in moving this investigation forward on the dozer grounds. There were two burial grounds. Is that correct? And after you had done your preliminary investigation on the first ground, the Bernardo family had to file an injunction for you to be able to investigate the second burial ground, is that right?

Erin Kimmerle:

Very close. So the school was segregated by law due to segregation at the time in 1900 and what had existed in modern times where we thought theBar ground would’ve been on the historically colored side of campus, what they called it. We only had that starting point because in the 1980s, they had been planting pine trees and actually dug up one of the graves, and then the school was like, oh, right, we have graves here. And they had the Boy Scouts put up these metal crosses that didn’t really correspond to graves, but just were in that vicinity where they intruded into one. So that was kind of our starting point. And so the thought by everyone was sort of, well, maybe there’s two burial grounds because of segregation. And the Varnado family, you mentioned Glenn had gone there in the 1980s looking for his uncle and had been shown two different burial locations by whoever showed him around just kind of pointing into the trees. It was never very clear why they thought that or anything. So at the time, the school grounds were still divided in terms of which state agencies controlled it so that the side of the school that had the potential burial ground was Department of Environmental Protection.

Yeah. The other side was the Department of Juvenile Justice, and that’s the side that had still been open up until 2011. DEP were the ones who said, who gave us permission come on the grounds, you can do your work. The Department of Juvenile Justice said, absolutely not, and you can’t even come on the grounds. And they were getting ready to,

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

They have a different incentive.

Erin Kimmerle:

And so Glen’s law lawsuit or injunction was basically to say, look, state of Florida, you can’t sell this property until I get my uncle back because you might be selling him. That’s where he got the injunction and it put a halt on their sale until we could search all of the grounds, and it was then that they had to open it to us. They otherwise were not going to.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Thank you for that clarification. That’s a fascinating way to go about getting an injunction claiming that you have basically unrecovered property on the property that was in question. You faced some roadblocks to digging or excavating, as you would call, including potential criminal charges. They threatened to lock you up. Aaron, do you

Erin Kimmerle:

Want to tell us about that? Was their frightening, honestly, the idea of going to jail in North Florida? I don’t know.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Yeah, especially we already know that the local law enforcement over there, they weren’t too friendly to you and didn’t like you that much. So can you tell us about those roadblocks and how you were able to overcome them?

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah, we had been doing that ground truthing I mentioned, where we were just digging shallow trenches, not disturbing graves, but trying to figure out what we’re seeing on the GPR. Is this in fact burials or is it, like I said, buried garbage or something else? Who knows? And in the course of doing that, the New York Times had come and did a story and took photos, and that’s what they responded to. And they said, ah, you’re desecrating burials. And so I thought it was really interesting because up until then they denied there were burials. So I’m like, which is it? I mean, you have to pick because I can’t be desecrated ’em if you say they’re not burials. So now you’re admitting they are. Fortunately, what ultimately happened is that because we had been working with an archeological permit, and at that point just trying to confirm the graves, we really weren’t intentionally destroying a grave, which is what the felony statute or third degree felony statute that they were trying to use as the willful destruction of a grave. So ultimately, the local district attorney said there wasn’t enough to charge. I think he was disappointed. He was very much on the side of opposition, and so if he could have made it work, I think that was his goal.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Wow. The DA had to weigh in on it. They actually took those frivolous claims seriously. But I am happy to hear that, Aaron, you were not arrested. You did not spend any time in jail for your work on this project.

Erin Kimmerle:

That’s right.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

The term you use of ground truthing or digging shallowly into the ground, how did you go from ground truthing to excavating and bringing out the remains of the boys who were deceased?

Erin Kimmerle:

So once we did all that work, we wrote a preliminary report, we shared it publicly and with the families, and that’s when the family said, we want excavation. And I always point that out because if the families had said, we don’t want it, I would’ve never pushed for it. This was not my goal. It was their goal and the fact that we had found so much more than what the state said that was there, and so many more inconsistencies. I mentioned the flu and stuff, but there was actual death certificates. One boy had run away and his death certificates said shot by person or persons unknown. That boy and his death and his death certificate never even appeared in the FDLE report. So it just really looked like either the worst investigation or something that was being mishandled or covered up in some way. And so we initially asked the medical examiner and local law enforcement to treat it as unknown graves on a property because that would be one way to do an excavation and to figure out who these people were, right?

Because in theory, I mean, they could have been buried the year before. We don’t really know who they are, but they declined immediately, which isn’t a surprise. And then we went to the Department of Historic Resources through an archeological permitt and sought permission that would also be a very normal way to go about excavating these burials. But because of political pressure, the Secretary of States said, no, that graves are not to be disturbed for research purposes as if this was like for my dissertation or something. And that was very upsetting because that should have been the right path. Basically, the workaround that we got was by going to the Florida cabinet. So the state who owns the land and saying basically, Hey, as the property owners, there’s these unwanted burials on your property. You have a right to remove burials from your property, which anyone does. You buy a piece of land, you can have graves removed if you find that they’re there. And they agreed and gave us a land use agreement. So it’s really interesting to me because it’s like we have these systems in place and the doors were just being shut because of political will. And so it was this complete work around the system that we had to find.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

I really have to tip my hat to you and your team for the creativity that was displayed throughout this entire investigation. If one route was a no or one agency was a no, then we’re going to reform the story and go to another agency. If that doesn’t work, then we have a backup. It really took some ingenuity to get to the bottom of this.

Erin Kimmerle:

We had a big team of people really dedicated and just very determined. And the families, like I said, were the motivation. I mean, they were the ones really rallying for this. And through all of that, I mean they were holding press conferences, meeting with journalists, they were meeting with politicians, writing to kind of begging and pleading. These were my, every single one of ’em said, my parents dying wishes. I told my mother I would keep searching. You don’t get over losing a child. And many of those parents died very prematurely that everyone attributed to the heartbreak and the loss of their sons, which is why they would say this killed my mother. And so they shared that with their local politicians and everybody to try to get that support.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Speaking of the work, the families, tell us about what it was like to identify George Owen and be able to tell George Owen’s family that you could give them some bit of peace.

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah. I had really fallen in love with his sister, Elle Crow. She I think was 83 at the time that I first met her. She was 13 when her brother George had been sent to the school. He ran away. He was brought back, he ran away, disappeared. They’re the family that went up there to try to work with the funeral home to get his remains shipped home. And the superintendent said, oh, I’m sorry. We just buried him here, unmarked in this field. And Ove talked a lot about that experience and how just even as a kid, as a 13-year-old, she’s knew that he was lying, that it wasn’t right. And she became one of Florida’s first female law officers and Lakeland, which is central Florida, and said she just always wanted to find him. Truth justice is just what she modeled her life after. And so as it turns out, looking back, he was actually the first burial we excavated and the first one we identified.

So that’s just a kind of crazy lot of coincidences, but that’s what happened. And so when we found out, I drove with her, I drove to see her and a number of the Hillsborough County people that worked with us. So Hillsborough County is in Tampa where the university is, and they were a huge asset, and they really did a lot to help us and help this investigation completely, not their jurisdiction, but something through what’s called agency assist. They’re able, they have the power, basically. They have the power to do more, and they chose to act on it. And so they were very dedicated. Anyway, we all went to COL and told her the good news, and I think she just was shocked. She just couldn’t believe it. And she’s like, are you sure? Is this real? She just had spent her whole life waiting for that day.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

That’s so inspiring to hear about Val’s story and that she was motivated to go into law enforcement based on what happened to her brother. And also with George being the first person to be identified or that being the relative, it seemed like you were given some momentum in your investigation. People couldn’t say anymore, oh, it’s a mules or whatever animal. No, this is somebody. We’re able to identify them. The family member has been very vocal. We need to continue. Do you feel as if that identification gave you some momentum?

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah, I think it just really brought it all together because even before the warden with his mule theory, the medical examiner, who should have known better, because I think he was being pressured by the county commissioners appointed him, but he is like, well, you’re not going to find anything. You’ll find nothing will be preserved. And it was like in science, we never find nothing because even an empty grave is still a grave. We’d still know there was a grave there. It is never a negative result. It still means something. And we found bones, we found teeth, we found leather belts, we found wood, we found hardware. So many artifacts from nails that a lot of the coffins have been made by the boys at the school. And I dunno if you ever made a wood box, but normally you put some kind of bracket in the corners to hold, so the box has strength. Well, these were children making these caskets, so they didn’t have braces or brackets. They just had a hundred nails. And so we find that where they’re basically using a hundred nails to hold the bottom of the casket on. Anyway, we found a lot. And to be able to identify them and then return them to their families, many of them had different types of burial or burial ceremonies. It was just very powerful.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

I recently went to Charleston, and they have a number of historic homes there. It was fascinating to see the amount that anthropologists were able to glean about the prior residents life based on bones and buttons and just things showing how people lived their lives are strips of cloth. So as you were saying, it speaks to the idea of there’s never nothing when it comes to anthropology, so much can be gleaned about how a society lived or how a person lived beyond just their bones and remains.

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah, exactly.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Thanks a good time for our second break. Let’s hop back into it. Aaron, can you tell us the history of the Earl Wilson trial and how you and your research was able to contradict the criminal conviction in that case?

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah, that was a really interesting and very sad story, I think. And I mean, the whole thing is very tragic, but then you get deep dive into some of the boys’ stories more closely, and it’s just tragedy and tragedy. Earl had, Wilson had been sent there. We met his sister Cherry, who had always been same thing, searching for him and promised her mother she’d keep searching when he was there, there had been a fight between a couple of boys. He wasn’t involved, but he sort of by association got caught up in it. And the punishment at the time was always this building called the White House, where they had received corporal punishment with whipping, and then they would be sent to isolation. And Earl was black, and the boys on the black side of campus went to what was called the Farm manager’s office, which was really a sweat box. They also called it a sweat box. So it was a little cement cylinder building, six by 10 feet, and they had put nine boys in there,

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Nine

Erin Kimmerle:

Boys, nine boys, and a one set of bunk beds. There was a bucket for a toilet, just a little air vent for a window. I mean, you can just imagine the heat in Florida.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

It’s a swamp, right?

Erin Kimmerle:

It’s a swamp, yeah. When I went in there, I mean, two of us barely fit. So I thought the question isn’t, how did Earl die? The question is how did any of ’em survive? I mean, how do eight boys even walk out of this? Because some of them had been in there for up to two weeks, and what happened is Earl was killed. Four boys kind of point the finger at the other four. They point fingers at each other, boys who aren’t involved, but get released and meet with the Wilson family, say it was actually a guard, but the boys were afraid. But the four boys become prosecution witness, and they say that he was beaten with a stick. The other four had beaten him with a stick. And the boys, I should say, they’re as young as 12, kind of like 12 to 16 years old, and the school had its own physician.

That physician did the autopsy and testified. Some might think of that as a conflict of interest in and of itself, but that’s what happened. He said that Earl was strangled. So imagine if you have today where your eyewitness accounts is completely different than your cause of death and medical examiner account, it was a one day trial. The families weren’t notified. The jury actually told the judge, they convicted the four boys, but said that they requested leniency. All four were sentenced to life, and all four died in prison, including the 12-year-old. One of the cases had been overturned on appeal and upheld on appeal, and it kind of made its way up through the state court system. To me, it’s such an important example and why the whole Dozier school is a reminder of what it meant and means to not have civil liberties. When you don’t have a lawyer, there’s no due process, families aren’t notified. There had even been numerous examples, including in this case where the sheriff had been in trouble for beating boys into confessions. Other cases were overturned for that. So to me, I think civil rights are so fragile and new and recent and important that this just shows you not that long ago what life was like for anyone entering the juvenile justice system.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

I think that’s an important takeaway when reading the book, thinking about the school or this moment in history is the need for the reforms that we have today so that hopefully children will not be subjected to something of this nature again. Earlier you mentioned the roadblocks, both political as well as from locals that were thrown up and impeding your investigation. Eventually, you did receive funding from the state of Florida to proceed. Can you tell us a bit about that change of tides and what you think led to you ultimately gaining support?

Erin Kimmerle:

Yeah, I think one thing that happened, so we talked a little bit about Glen Varnado. He had an uncle who was the brother to his uncle who was still living at the time, Richard and Richard was well into his eighties and had gone into the hospital, I think for pneumonia, but it was quite serious. And Glenn started to panic and started asking the nurses to take a DNA sample, because if he shouldn’t make it, then he wanted to have this DNA sample brother to brother. In older cases like this, having relatives who share a maternal relative like a mother is the best kind of DNA to get anyway, so of course the nursing staff was like, we can’t do that. And so we decided to hold an event where any of the families who had come forward or wanted to come and give a DNA sample, we would collect their DNA.

This was with the help of the Hillsborough Sheriff’s Office here in Tampa. Again, not the one that had jurisdiction, but it allowed us to basically put their information, those boys’ names and the DNA samples in a missing person’s database. And the idea being, well, maybe they’ll let us excavate, maybe not, but at least for the future, there’s a record. And I think that garnered so much public support and really helped sort of change the tide. And I think the fact that people could see at the time Sheriff G stepping up, and it’s like, why isn’t this just happening in the local community? Because it could literally be that simple if they wanted it to be.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Did you have a comms team or communications team that was working with you on it? Because it seems like the media played a significant role in advancing your investigation.

Erin Kimmerle:

The media was a huge asset and played a very powerful role, and we tried really hard to be as transparent and accessible as possible. So that just to dispel all the things that were being said about our intentions or what we were doing, we just thought that was the best way to approach it. And so Lara Wade at the time was the communications director at USF, and she really took this on and helped us navigate that. I would not have known how to do any of that. I’m very shy when it comes to the media, actually. And so she was just an incredible asset and helped.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

So really speaking of institutional support, it wasn’t just only not shutting down the investigation, but giving you the resources to help support it. And in talking about the media, Erin, I’m not going to let you get away without asking if you have read the Nickel Boy book or watched the Nickel Boys movie?

Erin Kimmerle:

Yes, to both. And I actually had the opportunity to meet Ramel Ross. He even came to Tampa and we did a big screening of the film at the Tampa Theater, which is the old historic Tampa theater. We had like 400 people show up, which was incredible. Wow. And I just adore that man. I think he’s brilliant, and I think I love the approach he took with the film. I thought it was so creative, and I’m excited to see what projects he does next. I just really appreciate his artistic style and tone and just thoughtfulness. He’s really a genius, I think.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Yeah, it wasn’t a surprise to see at all that the movie was nominated for an Oscar. My husband and I went to go see it in the movie theater, and I agree with you. I was pleasantly surprised by how creative and almost abstract the movie was. It changed your lens in terms of thinking about the event.

Erin Kimmerle:

And that’s the thing with a school like this, because there was so much violence perpetrated against the children, a film could easily be made that would almost look like a horror film. It’s just so heavy, and it’s already so tragic and heavy. So I feel like you want to share it with people and have the deeper and bigger issues understood without just getting hit so hard that it’s like you don’t get up from it. So I appreciated his approach in that way.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

And as a black person, I will say, and then move on from this, I am sick of the torture porn, the slave porn. So this was a way to convey that without it being so gory and graphic while still honoring the history. In the cover for your book, you did get a quote from Colson Whitehead. Did he consult with you or talk with you in writing Nickel Boys? Do you guys have a channel of communication?

Erin Kimmerle:

No, actually, I didn’t even really know about the book until it came out. He and some of what I’ve heard him say publicly and in the acknowledgements looked at our reports and used our reports as some of the background research. And yeah, I never had met him until that time and would’ve been happy to show him around the grounds, but he didn’t go there. I don’t blame him. I don’t enjoy going back there. I will say this though, they have very recently opened a memorial at the White House and at Boot Hill because the boys who were not identified were Reburied, some in Tallahassee and some at Boot Hill, which is the name of the burial ground, and it’s very powerful and well done. So if you are happen to be driving through there, it’s definitely worth stopping and looking at.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

I’m happy to hear that there is a proper place of respect at Dozier for the boys. The last question I’m going to ask you is what stayed with you the most from the Dozier investigation? What is the one thing that you would want people to take away?

Erin Kimmerle:

That’s a tough question. I mean, the whole experience was just, it was supposed to be this couple of weeks and some background research, and I just had no way of knowing what it would become and how encompassing it was. So I do think that for me, I think one of the takeaways at this point is just for people to think about this in the context of the Indian residential schools, because there’s a lot of support in Canada for investigations into the burials and deaths and other abuses and history that I haven’t seen in the United States, but we have over 400 schools and my money is on the fact that there was deaths at every one of ’em. And so it’s something that really needs to come to light because the one thing these historic justice projects I think have in common is that it’s not in the past. It’s really affects living people today, generationally. Some of them were there, incarcerated themselves, and so it, it’s just easy to think of stuff as like, oh, history. It’s in the past, and it’s not. It’s people’s experience.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

Thank you so much for joining us today, Aaron. It was really a pleasure to speak with you about your book and the research that you conducted.

Erin Kimmerle:

Well, thank you for having me. Enjoyed meeting you.

Maggie Mendenhall-Casey:

I also want to thank our executive producer, Jen Byrne, Adam Lockwood on Sound, and everyone at the Legal Talk Network Family. Remember, you can follow us and send us comments, questions, episode ideas, or just troll us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at cba, at theBar, all one word. You can also email us at [email protected]. Please also rate and leave us your feedback on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, audible, or wherever you download your podcast at. It helps us get the word out. Until next time, from everyone here at the CBA, thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you soon at theBar.