(NewsNation) — Dozens of men who were sent to a Florida reform school later ended up on death row in the same state as adults, according to investigative nonprofit group The Marshall Project.
At least 34 children who stayed at Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, and 16 at the Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee would eventually find themselves on Florida’s death row as adults, according to the nonprofit’s report.
The Marshall Project found that at least 19 others were sent to prison time for murder but did not receive a death penalty sentence. Twenty-five of them committed murders when they were 15, 16, 17 or 18 after they left the reform schools.
At least 114 people were killed by former residents of Dozier and Okeechobee, according to the report.
Michael Bell, a 54-year-old former resident who was executed Tuesday, told the Marshall Project he witnessed child residents being raped at Dozier. He said staff ignored cries for help and frequently slept through the attacks.
Bell said he was forced to fight “much larger” boys and that school guards would routinely place bets on the outcome.
In 2024, hundreds of others who say they suffered physical or sexual abuse at the schools in Florida were in line to receive tens of thousands of dollars in restitution from the state after Florida lawmakers formally apologized for the horrors they endured as children more than 50 years ago.
In recent years, hundreds of men have come forward to recount brutal beatings, sexual assaults, deaths and disappearances at the notorious school in the panhandle town of Marianna. Nearly 100 boys died from 1900 to 1973 at Dozier, some of them from gunshot wounds or blunt force trauma. Some of the boys’ bodies were shipped back home. Others were buried in unmarked graves that researchers only recently uncovered, according to The Associated Press.
In 2023, state lawmakers allocated $20 million to be equally divided among the schools’ surviving victims.
Allegations of abuse have hung over the Dozier school since soon after it opened in 1900, with reports of children being chained to the walls in irons. When then-Gov. Claude Kirk visited in 1968, he found the institution in disrepair with leaky ceilings, holes in walls, no heating for the winters and buckets used as toilets.
“If one of your kids were kept in such circumstances,” Kirk said then, “you’d be up there with rifles.”
Florida officials closed Dozier in 2011 following state and federal investigations and news reports documenting the abuses.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.