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Investigation of teen offender's death leads to state juvenile justice reforms
When officials with the Bay County, FIa., sheriff's office announced that a healthy, athletic 14-year-old boy had died unexpectedly of an apparent illness - only moments after what they described as a harmless "restraint"' at their boot camp - we wanted to know more about the incident.
We started asking questions on Jan. 6, the day Martin Lee Anderson was removed from a life-support system at Pensacola's Sacred Heart Hospital, and the story turned into a six-month investigation that would lead to system-wide changes in Florida's long-troubled juvenile justice system.
Our reporting also set in motion ongoing criminal and civil rights investigations into the youth's death, and forced prosecutors and law enforcement officers to re-examine an early finding that Anderson died of natural causes.
Relying on the Department of Juvenile Justice's own data, we initially reported that Florida's military-style youth camps were among the least effective youth programs in the state, yielding a 62 percent recidivism rate. We immediately requested all inspector general reports for the Panama City boot camp, revealing that in the two years before Anderson stopped breathing at the boot camp at least two other boys had claimed they'd been choked during a restraint.
The story of the teen's death gained national attention in February when The Miami Herald convinced two state lawmakers to describe what they saw on a grainy 30-40-minute videotape of Martin's last moments at the boot camp. The state representatives said Martin had been "brutally" beaten by...