Dead Boy’s Coffin Found Empty In Investigation Of Sadistic Florida Reform School

In the ongoing investigation of the horrific abuse suffered by inmates in a hellish Florida reform school, forensic researchers exhumed the grave of a boy who died trying to escape the school — and found the coffin empty.

The coffin, which should have been holding the body of Thomas Curry, had been shipped to his grandmother in Philadelphia in 1925 after the boy was found dead by some railroad tracks near Chattahoochee. According to ABC News, he had run away from the Florida School for Boys 20 miles away after serving only 29 days for delinquency.

The Tampa Bay Times reports that the University of Southern Florida anthropologists, accompanied by Philadelphia archdiocese officials, the Pennsylvania State Police, and the local district attorney, dug down six feet in the grave site where Curry was buried and found a partially intact wooden box. The thumbscrews used to hold it shut were the same as those they had found on other boys’ graves on the reform school campus, and there was small cross on top of the coffin. But when they opened the coffin, they were shocked by what they found. Instead of human remains, they found a pile of wood.

“I can’t believe it,” one of the University of South Florida researchers said. “It defies logic.”

Researchers had hoped to perform a skeletal autopsy on Curry, who is thought to have been about 17 when he died, to find out how he was killed. The coroner’s report from 1925 noted that the boy was found with a wound to the forehead and a crushed skull but ruled his cause of death “unknown.”

Investigators are not sure if the coffin was shipped to his grandmother containing the wood already or if Curry’s body was removed after it arrived in Philadelphia but they plan to continue looking for the his remains.

The Florida School for Boys, later renamed Dozier School for Boys, opened in 1900 and was closed by the state in 2011 when an investigation found evidence that inmates were being abused. Former guards revealed several years ago that searching for escapees was called “boy hunting” and state prison inmates named “dog boys” were sometimes used to help find boys who had fled the school. Former inmates of the hellish facility reported being brutally beaten for attempting to escape.

So far, the researchers have found 55 boys buried in a cemetery on the former reform school’s grounds in Marianna, Florida, many not recorded in state records. Three of the bodies have been identified using DNA and handed over to their families, who had no idea they were buried there. The tragic stories of two of the boys deaths are told in this related Inquisitr article.

[Image via WFSU]