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Governor Rick Scott and the Florida Cabinet listened today to pleas to save the former Dozier School for Boys as a monument to the kids that lost their lives there while in state custody.  A two year survey has yielded 51 bodies  buried on the campus, but as Mike Vasilinda tells us, a Dozier survivor believes more bodies are buried on the site.

These pictures of juveniles at the Dozier School for Boys are some of the last taken before the school closed. A two year search of the abandoned fourteen hundred acre campus has yielded 51 bodies. All were found on the black  side of the segregated campus. Charles Fudge came to the Capitol to say he thought there were more bodies.

“There is a cemetery on the white side. We were not desegregated in 60 and 61. I know there was a cemetery there. My brother knows the cemetery was there.Those boys need to be found” Fudge told the Governor and Cabinet.

Fudge and his brother spent a year at Dozier for stealing money out of a woman’s purse.
“They should never let any kind of building be put on that property. Those boys, you know, when we were sent there, we didn’t expect to be beaten, and we certainly didn’t expect to die.

Researcher Erin Kimmerle of the University of South Florida says she has done everything possible in her search for more remains.

“Does that mean we can certify there I’s no other burials? No. I mean no one could ever do that” says Kimmerle.

“Just six of the 51 bodies that have been recovered have been identified so far. But researcher Cr. Erin Kimmerle says she is close to identifying ten more” says the USF researcher.

The NAACP says many families don’t have the five thousand dollars it will cost for the reinternment their loved ones. It wants the state to pick up the cost.

The Final report from the University of South Florida is due at the end of the year. Decisions on what to do with the site will be made next year.