Emily Brown
Warning: This article contains discussion of child abuse and sexual assault which some readers may find distressing.
Michael Bell, Jesse Guardado, Jerry White, and dozens of others all have something in common. Not only did they go to the same boys' school in Florida, but they also ended up on death row.
Bell became the eighth person executed in Florida this year when he was put to death on July 15 for the 1993 murders of Jimmy West and Tamecka Smith.
Prior to his death, the convicted killer opened up about his childhood and some of the trauma he and many of his schoolmates were subject to while in attendance at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, which closed in 2011.
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Bell attended the school during 1986 and 1987 when he was 15 years old, and recalled being forced to fight other boys and beaten with a strap. Now, a report released by The Marshall Project shares more details about some of the experiences he and other death row prisoners went through.
Where other institutions might break up fights between students, Bell and other attendees claimed staff members at the school actually encouraged fights between the children. In fact, they would take bets on them.
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Bell told The Marshall Project that guards had forced him to fight boys who were much larger than him on at least six occasions, during which they took cash bets from other Dozier employees on whether he would win.
One guard who lost money on Bell allegedly sent him to an area of the school known as the 'white house', where he said an employee whipped him with a long leather strap about 10 times.
Abraham Hamza, a former Dozier student whose path did not end in prison, confirmed these kinds of accounts to The Marshall Project, saying he saw guards forcing children to fight each other and taking bets.
Bell has described being sexually assaulted by an employee during his time at the school, and made further claims about witnessing rapes on the premises, and hearing the cries of boys who were being sexually abused in his dorm room at night.
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There was a member of staff on duty during the nights, but Bell and another man from his dorm told The Marshall Project they often ignored or slept through the altercations.
Guardado, a 62-year-old on death row for killing a woman in 2004, said in court documents: “I saw people being raped and beaten. A horrible place. A nightmare.”
Hamza also reported seeing smaller boys at the school become targets of sexual abuse.
While Bell remembered being beaten with a leather strap at the school, Guardado described being 'beaten while [he] was in handcuffs and shackled'.
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The mother of former student Jerry White, who was executed after killing a 34-year-old in Orlando, also claimed he experienced a year of severe beatings while at the school.
Bell said he'd been shackled to a cot by his arms and legs, and left in that position for hours. Not long after arriving at the school, Bell, who is Black, said he learned to fight back, explaining: “I was light-skinned and real little … with curly hair and that’s like a sign of being weak.
“So people would disrespect you just because of that. And so you have to go in and fight them because they’re going to dog you and abuse you and do all kinds of stuff if you don’t, so I was used to it.”
According to The Marshall Project, 34 former Dozier students have been sentenced to death in Florida. Of those, 10 are still on death row, nine have been executed and five died of other causes, with the rest resentenced to life in prison.
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Artha Gillis, a child and adolescent forensic psychiatrist, has pointed out that there’s no way to scientifically prove that the Dozier abuse led to murder, but Dr. George Woods, a neuropsychiatry specialist in California, expressed belief that the school 'helped make these boys killers'.
Clinical psychologist Marlyne Israelian offered further insight to this claim, saying: “If you have grown up in an environment where you are being cruelly treated and beaten, and you are emotionally and physically in constant danger, your brain is going to read and perceive danger in everyone.
"You perceive a threat even in the absence of a threat because it is the adaptive thing to do in order for you to survive.”
Dozier was ultimately closed after an investigation from the US Department of Justice investigation which documented the abuse, and in 2024 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law awarding $20 million to those who were physically and sexually abused between 1940 and 1975 at Dozier, as well as at another boys' school, Okeechobee.
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However, no one has been charged or prosecuted for abuse at the schools.
If you’ve been affected by any of these issues or want to speak to someone in confidence regarding the welfare of a child, the Childhelp USA National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453) operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and receives calls from throughout the United States, Canada, US Virgin Islands, Guam and Puerto Rico.
You can contact The National Sexual Assault Hotline on 800.656.HOPE (4673), available 24/7. Or you can chat online via online.rainn.org