Aware of the school’s history, Erin Kimmerle, a University of South Florida forensic anthropologist, led a team in 2012 that unearthed remains on the former campus. That bodies lay there was no secret — 31 rusty, white crosses marked the resting places of victims who died from a dormitory fire, influenza, pneumonia and other causes — but Kimmerle’s team found 55 bodies on the 1,400-acre property.
Owen’s body, the team found out last month, was the first to be pulled out of the ground. The university announced the finding Thursday.
“We hope it’s the first of many identifications to come,” Kimmerle said.
After sending DNA samples to the University of North Texas’ Health Science Center, Kimmerle got a call July 25, telling her that one of the samples was a positive match for Krell, who, like other family members, had provided reference samples to researchers.
Kimmerle, who was chief forensic anthropologist for the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and has worked to excavate mass graves all over the world, including in Nigeria and Peru, was elated.
“Two years ago, (Krell) was inspirational to us to get involved and do this work. To find her brother and to find him first, we were all a little bit in shock,” she said.
She drove to Lakeland with officers from the Hillsborough Sheriff’s Department to tell Krell in person — out of respect, but also because she didn’t want Krell to be alone when she got the news.
“It was a total and complete surprise. It shocked me totally numb for a moment. I couldn’t say a word. I just looked at her,” Krell said. “This, to me, is a miracle because when I think of all the boys and all the graves — I know they sent 55 remains to be tested, and I’m the only one where they found a match?”
Unfortunately, researchers still don’t know how Owen died. It’s unclear whether the medical examiner will be able to determine a cause of death, Kimmerle said, and Florida’s District 14 medical examiner Michael Hunter did not return a call seeking comment.
Krell said she can’t muster enough kind words for Kimmerle and her team — “Through cold and hot weather, they kept digging away” — but Krell’s persistence shouldn’t be discounted.
Dogged pursuit of the truth
Years ago, Krell became worried that her brother’s story might go to the grave with her, so she thought, “I’ve got to write all this down while it’s in my mind.”
She jotted down what she knew and sent it to the governor, media, FBI, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, anyone she thought might be able to help find out what happened to Owen.
The St. Petersburg Times produced a 2009 special report, “For their own good,” and the FDLE opened a 2008 investigation at the behest of then-Gov. Charlie Crist.
Though ex-students provided detailed accounts of vicious beatings, sexual abuse and disappearances (Kimmerle’s team found records indicating 22 boys who died at the school weren’t accounted for), guards and administrators who are still alive denied the beatings.
The FDLE concluded there was insufficient evidence of physical or sexual abuse or that anyone died as a result of a criminal act.
“I really had begun to give up hope that they’d ever find him,” Krell said.
At age 12, Krell thought the stories about her brother were baloney. Even his arrest seemed fishy. Car theft? Owen was 14 and had never been behind the wheel of a car. Automatic transmissions weren’t as prevalent in those days. You had to know how to work a clutch and shift gears.
Despite coming from a loving but poor family, Owen ran away more than once. He always wanted to play in Nashville’s “Grand Ole Opry.” His passion was guitar, but “he could walk into any music store and play any instrument” without taking a single lesson, Krell said.
Krell suspects he was en route to Tennessee when he was arrested in Tavares, Florida, with a 19-year-old man.
“Owen had the wanderlust because he had so much in his body to give, and he just wanted to go out there and give it,” she said. “He had God-given talent coming out of the pores of his skin. … I never understood why God let him be born with that talent and let him be taken away like that.”‘
‘I got what was coming to me’
Owen ran away a few weeks after arriving at the Florida Industrial School for Boys. He was quickly apprehended and wrote home to tell his family about it.
Krell remembers one chilling sentence in the letter: “I got was coming to me.”
“Those were the most ominous words,” she said. “After that letter, we never heard from him again.”
Her mother wrote the school, inquiring as to his whereabouts. She was told he’d run away again.
“So far we have been unable to get any information concerning his whereabouts. We will be glad to get in touch with you just as soon as we are able to locate George, and in the meantime, we will appreciate your notifying us immediately if you receive any word from or concerning him,” Superintendent Millard Davidson wrote in January 1941.
Her mother wrote the school and said she would be traveling to Marianna, a five-hour drive today, “and she would not leave until she knew what happened,” Krell recalled.
“Four months he was missing before my mother threatened to start investigating, and the day before she arrives, they very mysteriously find his body under a house, totally-and-completely-beyond-recognition decomposed.”
School officials told the family they’d found Owen under a house in Marianna, where he’d caught pneumonia and died. Nonsense, a younger Krell thought.
“What 14-year-old boy would lay under there, get pneumonia and not come out?”
And why would Owen stay in Marianna after escaping the school? Wouldn’t he want to get as far away as possible?
Also, her brother was terrified of the dark. Krell wasn’t — “I’ve never been scared of the devil himself” — and her brother knew it, so when the two came back from errands or the theater as night fell, Owen would clutch the hand of his little sister, two years his minor, to calm his own fears.
“They told us he crawled under a dark house to die. … This is a stupid story to tell,” she said. “It was all a bunch of lies.”
A blessing to be shot?
One of the students at the school would later tell Krell he was with Owen when he ran away from the school a second time. The two were caught, the former student told her, and Owen took off running, three men firing rifles at him as he scampered across an open field.
“If they shot him and killed him that night, I’d consider it a blessing because I know now what they did to him if they got him back to that school alive,” she said.
Though the state investigation said there insufficient evidence of abuse, dozens of men, many of them now senior citizens, have come forward with their stories. A support group for ex-students, dubbed The White House Boys, takes its moniker from the structure where boys say they were taken to be beaten with a leather strap attached to a wooden handle.
The White House Boys say they were whipped until their underwear was embedded in their buttocks. Some were beaten unconscious. Crying or screaming out would earn you extra lashes, they say.
“The more I learned, the more I knew his death didn’t happen under that house. It just didn’t,” Krell said.
The mystery surrounding Owen’s death — and the fact his family never received his body; school officials said he’d been buried on campus — robbed the family of any closure.
Krell’s mother would stay up till midnight at times, listening for Owen whistling as he walked down the road. Decades after his death, when Krell and her mother saw a country music singer named George Owens on TV, they thought, “Could it be?”
They investigated. It wasn’t.
“Was he really dead or was he out there wandering around, afraid to come home?” Krell couldn’t help but think, “One day, I’ll have a knock at the door.” It never came.
“Everyone ought to be ashamed”
Owens’ death may have guided Krell into a career in law enforcement. She spent 23 years as a Lakeland police officer, and she often spent her free time in the detectives’ bureau and forensic department studying things like decomposition times in different weather conditions.
She had a chance to go into forensics. She was even invited to the FBI school, a six-week program. She never pursued it because she had to care for her quadriplegic husband and three children, but her time in law enforcement reinforced one thing: Owen didn’t die under a house.
She parses no words discussing the “piss-poor” state investigation that never brought an investigator to her door and that flew in the face of a century-long paper trail of barbarous discipline (a 1903 report stated boys were kept in leg irons, while a 1911 report said the boys were “brutally punished” with a leather strap, according to the St. Petersburg Times special report).
“The town of Marianna, they ought to be ashamed. Everyone ought to be ashamed, the whole state of Florida,” Krell said.
Though she’s overjoyed at the prospect of giving Owen a proper burial after 74 years, it’s bittersweet. The week after Owen was identified, she lost her brother, Carlton, 70, after a long battle with illness.
Krell will look on the bright side, she said.
“Maybe this is better. Now, we can get both of them laid to rest, and we can relax,” she said.
Despite losing Carlton, she’s still buoyed by fulfilling her parents’ dying wish, and she believes in her heart that they’ll be smiling down on her when Owen is placed in the ground between them.
“I wanted so bad to do what I promised my parents,” she said. “I can’t help but believe it in my soul: I believe my mom and dad are going to know about that. … They always were proud.”
More From Huffington PostAs the bodies exhumed from dozens of old graves at a shuttered Florida reform school continue to yield grudging answers to stubborn mysteries, researchers investigating the cases this week released a report on what they know so far.
There was the 6-year-old boy who ended up dead after being sent to work as a house boy. And another boy who escaped but was later found shot to death with a blanket pulled over his body and a shotgun across his legs. Then there was the "rape dungeon" where boys were taken and abused.
What the researchers have learned about decades of horrific acts carried out at the now closed Arthur G. Dozier School in Marianna is outlined in a report released by the University of South Florida as researchers continue grappling with the mystery of the graves and deaths there.
University anthropologists have found the remains of 51 people buried at the school during a dig that also uncovered garbage, syringes, drug bottles and a dog encased in an old water cooler buried in the cemetery.
They are not only trying to identify who was buried there, but the stories behind how they and others died at the school.
Beyond studying remains, researchers are looking through the school and state records, newspaper archives and interviewing boys' families, former inmates and former school employees to provide a history of the dead.
"Maybe I've been doing this too long, but I'm not surprised at what horrible things people do to one another," said USF anthropologist Erin Kimmerle, the team leader who has researched other mass graves. "It's just really sad the way people treat one another, which may be in part what's captured the public's attention on this — just the sense that it's not right."
The report, prepared for the Florida Cabinet, identifies two more people buried in graves, in addition to three who were identified previously. One was Bennett Evans, an employee who died in a 1914 dorm fire. While there wasn't a DNA match, remains found are consistent with his age and cause of death. The other was Sam Morgan, who was brought to the school in 1915 at age 18 and later wound up dead in a case that still has unanswered questions. Morgan was identified through a DNA match with his relatives.
To date, the remains of four people have been identified through DNA matches.
It's not an easy project. The school underreported deaths; didn't provide death certificates, names or details in many cases, particularly involving black boys; and simply reported some boys who disappeared as no longer at the school. And many in the Panhandle community don't want to talk about the school's dark past.
Several of the boys were killed after escape attempts, including Robert Hewitt, whose family lived a few miles from the school. He was hiding in his family's house and men from the school came looking for him several times after the 1960 escape, according to relatives. The family came home one day to find his covered body lying in a bed. He had a shotgun wound and his father's shotgun was lying across his legs.
There's also the story of 6-year-old George Grissam, who the school sent out to work as a house boy in 1918. He was delivered back to the school unconscious and later died. George's 8-year-old brother Ernest also disappeared from school records, which simply described him as "not here."
Other boys died after severe beatings, being smashed in the head or other injuries. Former inmates and employees interviewed also told researchers about a "rape dungeon" where boys, some younger than 12, were sexually assaulted.
While many of the cases are nearly a century old, some of the dead have surviving brothers, sisters and other relatives still seeking answers.
"To some of this is history, but for many of the people who are involved it's actually their reality every day," Kimmerle said. "They're really committed and moved by this because it's their direct family."
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