Grave Excavation at Infamous Reform School Begins, USF Researchers Hope to Identify Remains and Determine Cause of Death

Anthropologists from the University of South Florida began exhuming the graves of dozens of boys from a former reform school that was infamous for the beatings that took place during the 1950s and 1960s, it is hoped that they will be able to identify the bodies and determine how they died, according to the Associated Press.

"In these historic cases, it's really about having an accurate record and finding out what happened and knowing the truth about what happened," Erin Kimmerie, the anthropologist heading the excavation, told the Associated Press.

The Dozier School for Boys, located in Marianna, Fla., closed in 2011. In recent years former students of the school have come forward with stories alleging sexual abuse, torture and the killing of students during the 1940's through 1960's. Close to 100 children died in the nearly 100 year history of the school but poorly kept records fail to account for the identity of all of the bodies buried in the woods and marked by 31 crosses, according to CNN.

"They were poor kids and lot of times, people never came to visit them," Elmore Bryant, head of the NAACP in Jackson County, Fla., told CNN. "Even when they were dismissed, they got home, their family had moved. So, who was going to pay attention if something happened to them while they was at Dozier?"

There was a small, white building on the campus of Dozier where former students allege the majority of the beatings took place, students called it the "White House." Robert Straley, a former student who was taken to the "White House" the first day at Dozier, came forward with a group of other former students to expose what had happened there years ago, their group has been called the "White House Boys," according to CNN.

"I came out of there in shock, and when they hit you, you went down a foot in to the bed, and so hard, I couldn't believe," Straley said. "I didn't know what they were hitting you with."

The goal of the exhumation is to hopefully identify the bodies so that closure can be given to families who never knew what happened to their loved ones, according to the Associated Press.

"They want to bury them in family plots and next to the boys' mothers and things like that," Kimmerie said. "Anyone whose remains are unidentified will be re-interned here at Boot Hill."