“God, I sure hope so.”
I nodded at the newspaper article he’d brought me. “May I keep this?”
“Of course.”
I folded the page and tucked it into my pocket. “At least this school isn’t still in business. Let’s hope that sort of brutality is a thing of the past.”
He gave me an ironic smile. “Martin Lee Anderson.”
“Excuse me?”
“Martin Lee Anderson. Look him up. You won’t have any trouble finding him.”
Thirty minutes after I’d happily polished off seven Apalachicola Bay oysters, I settled myself in front of a computer at the Leon County Public Library, in downtown Tallahassee, and typed “Martin Lee Anderson” into the Google search bar. In a fraction of a second—thirteen one-hundredths of a second, the screen informed me—the search engine found 7,600,000 hits. I clicked on the first one, a Wikipedia entry ominously titled “Martin Anderson death controversy,” and began to read: “Martin Lee Anderson (c. January 15, 1991–January 6, 2006) was a 14-year-old from Florida who died while incarcerated at a boot-camp-style youth detention center, the Bay County Boot Camp, located in Panama City, Florida, and operated by the Bay County Sheriff’s Office. Anderson collapsed while performing required physical training at the camp. While running track, he stopped and complained of fatigue. The guards coerced him to continue his run, but then he collapsed and died.”
It sounded like a sad accident, but hardly the same sort of abuse as the reform school beatings detailed by the article Goldman had brought me. Over the years, I’d read many stories of teenage athletes—usually high school football players—who died of heatstroke or heart failure during hot summer practices.
But the more I read about Anderson’s death, the less it seemed to be simply a sad accident. A YouTube video, taken from a surveillance camera, had recorded how the guards “coerced” Anderson. The image was grainy, and the view was often obscured by the cluster of guards, but the clip seemed to show the black boy being knocked to the ground, dragged around, and subjected to punches and choke holds by a group of seven guards. During most of the “coercion”—which continued for half an hour—a nurse stood by and watched; eventually, she knelt down and used a stethoscope to listen for a heartbeat, and after she did, two guards jogged away to summon emergency medics. But by then it was too late.
What I saw on the video was disturbing, but what I read was even more disturbing. The local medical examiner initially ruled that Martin Anderson’s death was an accident caused by sickle-cell trait, a blood disorder in African Americans that sometimes distorts red blood cells, limiting their capacity to carry oxygen. But the boy’s family and the NAACP challenged the M.E.’s findings and demanded a further investigation. The U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation, the original medical examiner was fired, and the boy’s body was exhumed for a second autopsy by a different M.E. The investigation revealed that Anderson’s mouth had been covered by guards while ammonia capsules were held beneath his nostrils. The second M.E. reached a far different conclusion from the first one. With his mouth clamped shut and ammonia fumes repeatedly forced up his nose, Martin Lee Anderson, age fourteen, died of suffocation.
The end of the video clip showed the boy’s limp body being hoisted onto a gurney and wheeled away—barely two hours after he’d gotten off the bus for his first day of boot camp.
The more things change, I thought, the more things stay the same. No wonder Goldman had given me that sad, ironic smile when I’d said that brutality to kids was a thing of the past.
Chapter 10
We’d arranged for Kate Nicely’s body to be brought into the embalming room of Morningside Funeral home, figuring it would be equipped with an exhaust fan to remove odors and a floor drain to remove fluids. Thanks to Burton “Grease” DeVriess and his two degrees of separation from a Georgia judge, the coffin had been freshly exhumed, though I knew that fresh would not be a word likely to describe the corpse sealed inside.
When Angie and I arrived, we presented ourselves once again to the receptionist, Lily—whose name, I realized, was perfect for a woman who made her living from the dead. As before, Lily looked flustered by our arrival, or possibly by our mere existence; again, she fled swiftly into the inner sanctum of her boss’s office to announce us. Once more, the lugubrious Samuel Montgomery emerged, and I asked if everything was ready for us.