First set of remains ID'd as Polk Co. boy at Dozier school site

TAMPA, Fla. — University of South Florida forensic experts said Thursday that for the first time they have identified the remains of a boy buried at a now-closed Panhandle reform school where some guards were accused of brutality.

Researchers said they used DNA and other tests to identify the remains of George Owen Smith, of Polk County, who was 14 when he disappeared from the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in 1940. They couldn't say how Smith died.

Official records indicated 31 burials at the school, but researchers found the remains of 55 people during a four-month excavation last year.

Researchers said Smith's body was found in a hastily buried grave wrapped only in a burial shroud. His remains' DNA matched a sample taken from his sister, Ovell Krell.

Krell said she has been waiting seven decades for this day to come.

"It's been a long journey for me, but it's been worth it," she said. "We're going to put him at rest and I hope my mom and dad's at rest."

"It is our hope this is the first of many identifications to come," said Dr. Erin Kimmerle, who helped with the excavations.

University officials in a press release said Smith's mother wrote the school's superintendent, Millard Davidson, in December 1940 asking about her son. She got a letter back saying no one knew where he was.

Some former students from the 1950s and 1960s have accused employees and guards at the Panhandle school of physical and sexual abuse, but the Florida Department of Law Enforcement concluded after an investigation that it couldn't substantiate or dispute the claims. Many former Dozier inmates from that era call themselves "The White House Boys" after the white building where they say the worst abuse took place.

Researchers began last September excavating the graveyard at the school, which closed in 2011 for budgetary reasons. The dig finished in December.

The school opened in 1900 and housed over 500 boys at its peak in the 1960s, most of them for minor offenses such as truancy or running away from home.

In 1968, when corporal punishment was outlawed at state-run institutions, then-Gov. Claude Kirk visited and found the institution in disrepair with leaky ceilings, holes in walls, cramped sleeping quarters, no heating for the winters and buckets used as toilets.

"If one of your kids were kept in such circumstances," he said then, "you'd be up there with rifles."

All the bodies found were interred in coffins made at the school or bought from manufacturers, university officials have said. Some were found under roads or overgrown trees, well away from the white, metal crosses marking the 31 officially recorded graves.

Officials have said that it's unclear if there are other graves elsewhere on the school site. The team excavated about 5 acres of the property's 1,400 acres.

WFTV