 Another videotaped beating, this time in Florida, is raising serious questions not only about Florida's juvenile justice system, but about whether county officials can be trusted to investigate their own.
The medical examiner for Bay County, Florida says Martin Lee Anderson, a 14-year-old boy who had been sentenced to boot camp after he and another boy took Anderson's grandmother's Jeep for a joyride, (Anderson later violated his probation by trespassing at a school, and was then sentenced to the camp...) died "naturally," of internal bleeding due to sickle cell trait, a relatively common blood abnormality found in one in 12 African-Americans.
But Anderson died on January 5th, just one day after he arrived at the boot camp, where he spent less than two hours before guards spent a full half-hour beating, wrestling, restraining, kneeing and kicking him until he was unconscious.
How much of a coincidence is that!
The 80-minute videotape (described in detail here) of the confrontation between Anderson and the deputies, which was released by authorities only after news organizations sued, shows Anderson being restrained and manhandled by as many as nine guards at a time, while intermittently, a nurse in a white lab coat looks on, eventually checking the boy after he goes perfectly limp on the ground and the five remaining deputies begin to look alarmed (there is no sound on the tape). In fact, Anderson is limp during much of the last part of the tape. He had complained of shortness of breath during the running and exercises that are required of new inmates at the camp, and when he became "uncooperative," according to guards, he was "restrained," including by being shoved against a tree, kneed in the back, and hit with what look like closed fists. As for the bruises and other external injuries that showed up in the autopsy?
The autopsy by county Medical Examiner Charles Siebert found bruises and scrapes on the boy's body but said they were linked to attempts to resuscitate him. It blamed his internal bleeding on sickle cell disorder, which is present in one in 12 African-Americans but doesn't show up in routine blood work. The Anderson case is being investigated for possible civil rights violations by the Justice Department (though this is the same justice department that has all-but frozen its civil rights prosecution division.) The boy's parents want the guards and the nurse fired and tried for the teen's death, but don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen, either.
Has there been a cover-up in this case? Siebert apparently initially called the request for an autospy in Bay County (where the boot camp is located) rather than in Escambia County, where the hospital where the boy died is located,) "highly unusual", although he denies having said that, now. Why would it be unusual? Because it looks like the FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement) asked that the death be examined in friendly Bay County, where the FDLE commissioner, Guy Tunnell, used to be sheriff. And the Escambia County M.E., a guy named Jeff Martin, says his county passed the autopsy back to Bay county as a "courtesy" to his counterparts in Bay County and to FDLE... By the way, Tunnell founded the boot camp where Anderson died. Unusual, indeed.
And how common are deaths from sickle cell trait, anyway? Not very. According to federal statistics, there were more than 2 million carriers for sickle cell trait in the U.S. in 1999. Of those, 72,000 actually had the more dangerous sickle cell anemia. And of those, 501 died in 1999. That's a ratio of 0.70% in terms of deaths vs. prevalence of the trait. And if deaths from sickle cell anemia are rare, deaths from simply carrying the trait are almost unheard of (fellow medical examiners and experts have called Siebert's conclusions "preposterous."
And what about the possible complications of sickle sell? Could Martin have died from one of those? They can include the following: ... note that spontaneous internal bleeding isn't among them.
Experts who have talked to the Miami Herald have had lots to say about the exculpatory autopsy: Two South Florida experts on sickle cell also expressed considerable doubt that a healthy teenager with only the trait, not the disease, would die abruptly unless he was seriously deprived of oxygen. Dr. Stuart Toledano, director of the University of Miami medical school's division of pediatric hematology and oncology, has been studying sickle cell for more than three decades. He said he is not aware of any teen dying from sickle cell trait unless they were oxygen-deprived, such as in ''high-mountain climbing'' or on an unpressurized airplane.
[....]
''I've been in the field since the early '70s, and I cannot remember a child with sickle cell anemia, let alone sickle cell trait,'' who bled to death from exercise, Toledano said.
[Medical examiner] Siebert may have based his conclusion on findings that several of Martin's blood cells were ''sickling,'' a process in which healthy cells mutate into a sickle shape, Toledano said. But Toledano said he would expect that the blood cells of a youth with the trait would normally sickle upon the teen's death.
''Lacerations and contusions, that is not a part of sickle cell anything,'' Toledano said. ``I don't see how I can say that any more bluntly.''
Dr. Thomas Harrington, director of the Adult Sickle Cell Clinic at Jackson Memorial Hospital, said that for someone with the ''very common'' sickle cell trait to die abruptly of complications from the disease would mean that his body had to be under enormous stress, probably dehydrated and oxygen-deprived. ''I don't see where the natural causes come in,'' he said after having the report read to him. ``You have to be under pretty severe physical stress to die with sickle cell trait.''
So why would this medical examiner come to such a controversial conclusion? Perhaps to spare the deputies, the boot camp, and the county major embarrassment? Or perhaps to avoid a messier conclusion: even before the videotape was forced out into the open, the Associated Press obtained copies of memos written by Bay County Sheriff Frank McKeithen ordering drill sergeants at the boot camps to stop using ammonia capsules on teens who "faked being unconscious." The memo was written on January 5th, the same day Anderson died. Coincidentally (of course...) lawyers for Anderson's family say the guards forced ammonia capsules up the boy's nose in an effort to keep him conscious at some point during the beating.
Is this evidence of a cover-up? Who knows. But it's worth looking into. (In addition to the Justice Dept, the FDLE is looking into it, but since the department runs the state's boot camps, it seems to be a case of law enforcement investigating itself.)
[Sidebar: Siebert was nominated to his post by the State Medical Examiners Commission in 2002 after being nominated to fill a vacancy by State Attorney Jim Appleman. Before that, he was an Associate Medical Examiner and Largo and West Palm Beach, Florida. (By the way, Appleman was once at the center of another odd case, in which he became the first of three state attorneys who declined to prosecute a wealthy man who had recently been named Panama City medical examiner in the suspicious death of his wife...)]
Martin Anderson was the third teenager to die in state custody in Florida in as many years. He was one of about 600 boys aged 14-18 languising in the state's five boot camps (soon to be four, after one in Martin County closes this year.) When the boot camp concept came to Florida in 1993, five years before Jeb Bush became governor, by the way, there were nine such facilities.
The other deaths were, like Anderson, of African-American boys:
Willie Lawrence Durden III of Jacksonville, Florida, was found unconscious in his cell at the Cypress Creek Juvenile Offender Corrections Centre in Citrus County, Florida, last October and Omar Paisley, also 17, died from a burst appendix that went untreated in June 2003 at a juvenile detention facility in Miami.
So many questions remain in this case, it would take another ten blog entries to detail them all. The NAACP is now involved in the case, and the family is planning to file a lawsuit. Even a Republican elected official, Gus Bareiro, has jumped into the case, demanding answers along with Democratic elected officials like Tony Hill and Fredricka Wilson. Stay tuned.
A roundup of news on the case can be found here.
Tags: Martin Lee Anderson, Florida, Juvenile Justice, Cover-ups |
