Eight years before a jury sentenced him to death for two murders and he confessed to three more, Michael Bell spent time at a Florida reform school so violent that the state later apologized for the abuse and paid millions to the victims.
The now 54-year-old Bell, who is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday, spent four chaotic months at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna during 1986 and 1987 when he was 15.
Guards forced him to fight much larger boys at least six times, he said, taking cash bets from other Dozier employees on whether he would win. They threw him face down on a cot in a squat building everyone called “the white house” and told him to grasp the headrail, while beating him with a leather strap until he bled. They shackled his arms and legs and left him in that position for hours.
Bell is among at least 34 boys who stayed at Dozier and another 16 sent to Okeechobee — a separate boys’ school with a troubled history — who ended up on Florida’s death row, according to a review by The Marshall Project. At least 19 others, and possibly many more, went to prison for murder but were not sentenced to death. Twenty-five of them killed when they were 15, 16, 17 or 18 – soon after departing the reform schools. Combined, men who attended Dozier and Okeechobee have killed at least 114 people.
Most people who are tormented in childhood do not become murderers, and it can be difficult to know why someone commits violence, experts say. Some boys who went to Dozier likely would have committed murders regardless of the trauma they suffered at the reform school. But research shows that childhood and adolescent abuse does affect brain development and can make people more violent.
Bell and other men sent to Dozier around the same time described to The Marshall Project a culture of fear, a foreboding that escalated at night when older boys stole in through the windows and beat up or sexually abused younger ones.
Dr. George Woods is a neuropsychiatry specialist in California who offered expert testimony in the 2010 case of another death row inmate sent to Dozier as a child. Woods said the institution literally beat the humanity out of some boys, whittling away their value for human life. “Dozier helped make these boys killers,” he said.
Bell was convicted for the 1993 shooting deaths of two people in a Jacksonville parking lot. In June, he sat in a Duval County courtroom, some two-dozen family and friends behind him in the gallery, as his lawyers fought for his life. Gov. Ron DeSantis had just signed his death warrant.
Witnesses testified about whether the original detective and prosecutor in his case had coerced them into testifying against Bell at his 1995 trial. The judge would later rule they had not.
Bell’s 73-year-old aunt, Paula Goins, who worked 35 years for a federal court and arrived in a wheelchair, brought up Dozier in her testimony. “I know Michael has never been the same since that Dozier school,” Goins testified. “That boy came back home damaged.”
The human brain reaches full size and volume in early adolescence. But in the late 1990s, neuroscientists discovered that some brain structures continue to develop and mature through the mid-20s and beyond. That includes the parts of the brain involved in impulse control and higher-order cognition, such as learning and reasoning and decision-making.
The prefrontal cortex – the area of the brain that regulates emotions, behavior and memory processing – is the last region to connect to others, one which may not fully integrate until the third decade of life.
Neuroscientists have found that an abused child’s brain will not mature as easily. The brain matter covering its connections is damaged with “cuts,” similar to how a worn wire might fray and split. As a result, the brains of abused children are more prone to arousal and less able to regulate impulsive behavior or control angry outbursts.
A 2024 review of 14 studies published in “Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging” found that abuse can disrupt and rewire neural pathways involved in problem-solving, leading to struggles with emotions and empathy.
“Developmental neuroscientists have come to think that there are two periods of life during which people are very sensitive to their environment,” said Martha J. Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “The first is in very early life. But there’s increasingly a view that adolescence is a second sensitive period.”
It was during this sensitive time of adolescence that Bell first experienced the harrowing world of Dozier. When Bell’s appeals lawyers, assistant federal public defenders Greg Brown and Tennie Martin, examined his case in recent years, they began to wonder about the school’s impact on their client. They also soon noticed that a number of death-sentenced men mentioned the state-run school in their appeals. Attorneys in death penalty cases often raise the issue of past trauma as a mitigating factor for juries to consider when deciding punishment.
Yet no lawyer had previously brought up the rapes and beatings that Bell witnessed during his stay at Dozier, Brown and Martin said. Bell never had a psychological examination. The more they researched, the more they learned that he was someone whose brain had likely been scarred by violence, first in his childhood home and the streets of north Jacksonville, and later at Dozier. A violent environment, they learned, can damage the brain and make teenagers engage in risky behavior.
“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,” said clinical psychologist Marlyne Israelian, who has a practice in Atlanta and travels the country conducting and interpreting neuropsychological evaluations of men on death row. “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.”
Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Bruce D. Perry has focused much of his research on how childhood trauma affects the brain. “You have this explosive reaction to anybody who crosses you or frustrates you,” Perry said. “And there are many people who end up in jail because of that adaptation. They've used that fight-or-flight response. … And so when they get frustrated at a 7-11, because somebody pushes in line in front of them, that might end up in them stabbing somebody.”
Experts caution that while childhood and adolescent trauma can make people more violent, it’s difficult to determine why a person committed an individual crime.
Artha Gillis, a child and adolescent forensic psychiatrist and assistant professor at UCLA who is studying a group of 147,000 youth, said there’s no way to scientifically prove that the Dozier abuse led to murder. You would have to get scans of their brains before and after the abuse and after they kill. But, Gillis said, Dozier taught the boys to be more violent at a time when their brains were malleable. “I would say it's definitely reasonable and plausible to say that being conditioned in this environment put them at great risk to enact violence on other people that was lethal.”
The irony of a state reform school inflicting damage on children is not lost on some experts. “So not only did the reform school not help them, it helped compromise their judgment and decision-making ability, leaving them more damaged than when they arrived,” said Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University in Philadelphia. “It especially seems very morally reprehensible that we want to execute someone who is disabled this way, because of an experience they had growing up.”
For a more than a century, headlines and reports spilled out of Dozier detailing beatings, whippings, torture, solitary confinement, shacklings, hog tying, rapes and deaths. The school finally closed in 2011 following a series of stories in the Tampa Bay Times and a U.S. Department of Justice investigation that documented the abuse. Dozier was the basis for the 2019 novel “The Nickel Boys,” which was recently made into a film.
Bell had heard horror stories about Dozier when he landed in juvenile detention in 1986 for stealing a car at age 15. He eventually ended up in Lincoln Cottage dormitory at Dozier. When he first arrived, Bell was a frequent target but soon proved he could fight, he said.
“I was light-skinned and real little … with curly hair and that’s like a sign of being weak,” said Bell, who is Black. “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.”
Bell, who spoke on the phone to The Marshall Project more than a dozen times from death row, described his experience at Dozier as “torture.” He said an employee sexually assaulted him. He witnessed rapes behind a building and in the bathroom, and he heard the cries of boys who were being raped in his dorm at night. The single adult on duty often ignored or slept through much of the brutality, said Bell and another man who was in Bell’s dorm as a boy.
Bell and two men who were at Dozier at the same time said that employees at Dozier often staged fights and wagered on them. Bell was pulled into these guard-engineered fights over and over. A guard who lost money on him sent him to the white house, where an employee whipped him with a long leather strap about 10 times, he said. “Everything there was like a total shock to see it like that,” Bell said. “But you had to adapt. You kept your mouth closed, and you kept out of the way.”
Other men on and off death row, who spent time at Dozier before, during and after Bell, reported more of the same and worse.
Jesse Guardado, 62, on death row for killing a 75-year-old Walton County woman during the tail-end of a 2004 crack binge, witnessed countless criminal acts at Dozier and was physically abused. “I was beaten while I was in handcuffs and shackled,” he said in court documents in his case. “I saw people being raped and beaten. A horrible place. A nightmare.”
Jerry White ended up in Dozier at age 14 following his first arrest for a burglary in 1962. He experienced a year of severe beatings, his mother told the Orlando Sentinel in 1995, and went on to rack up nine felony convictions before he robbed an Orlando grocery store in 1981 and killed a 34-year-old customer. The paralyzed store owner later died from his injuries. Florida executed White in 1995.
Before the state executed him in 2013, William Van Poyck, who killed a West Palm Beach prison guard with an accomplice in 1987, brought up his abuse at the Okeechobee boys’ school in court documents. He said employees hogtied him, soaked him with water and left him on the floor. Several times, they brought Van Poyck to the “ice cream room,” and struck him with paddles and straps 30 times. If he cried out, they repeated the beating.
Men in prison aren’t the only ones with horrific stories about Dozier and Okeechobee.
Abraham Hamza, a married father and Marine veteran living in Jacksonville, arrived at Dozier when he was 16 in 1987, around the same time Bell arrived. They did not know each other, he said in a phone interview, but stories from his 10 months there mirrored those of Bell and many of the other boys. He was stabbed. He saw guards force kids to fight each other and bet on them. He observed smaller boys become targets of sexual abuse.
At least one man on death row said some employees did care about the boys at Dozier. Craig Wall, 49, facing execution for killing his girlfriend and their 5-week-old baby in 2010, said he received love and support from Dozier employees while he was there in the mid-90s.
The men sent to death row represent a small percentage of all the people who spent time at the schools. Of the 34 former Dozier residents later sentenced to death in Florida, 10 are still on death row, nine have been executed and five died of other causes. The rest were resentenced to life in prison for various reasons. The names of the boys who attended Dozier are not public until 50 years after they leave, so there could be more death row prisoners who spent time at the school.
In 2009, Ben Montgomery, a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, pulled a list out of a toilet at Dozier with the names of 180 boys who had been there on a single day, April 22, 1988. The newspaper ran down every name on the list and found that 97% of them had been arrested again after leaving Dozier.
In 2024, Gov. DeSantis signed a law awarding $20 million to those who were physically and sexually abused between 1940 and 1975 at Dozier and Okeechobee.
Despite several investigations, no one has been charged or prosecuted for abuse at the schools.
For most of his childhood, Michael Bell lived in the same house where his mother, Margo Hampton, grew up in the Moncrief neighborhood, on the northside of Jacksonville. Bell described it as “a ghetto ... the hardest part.”
Bell returned to the neighborhood when he got out of Dozier in early 1987.
He feuded with another man, Theodore Wright, over a girl. Soon, the two were trading bullets in the streets, according to police reports and witnesses, and killing others in the process.
Three years after he got out of Dozier, Bell was convicted of armed robbery and spent three years in prison. Weeks after getting out, his nemesis, Wright, shot and killed Bell’s younger brother, Lamar. Bell held his brother in his arms and tried to plug the bullet holes in his chest with his fingers. His brother had had a gun, so Wright’s killing him was ruled self-defense.
Months later, in December 1993, Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office reports say, Bell, then 22, saw Wright's yellow Plymouth Fury in the parking lot of a lounge.
But the car was being driven not by Wright but by his 23-year-old brother, Jimmy West. He exited the club with 18-year-old Tamecka Smith and her mother’s friend.
Wearing a ski mask, Bell sprayed the parking lot with at least 30 bullets from an AK-47 rifle, according to sheriff’s office reports, hitting a nearby home and killing West and Smith.
A jury convicted Bell of murder in March 1995. Within months, authorities accused him of three other murders, including the 1993 killing of his mother’s boyfriend, Michael Johnson, and the 1989 drive-by shootings of his girlfriend, LaShawn Cowart, and her 2-year-old son.
Bell has denied committing these three murders, his lawyers say. But a week after being charged with killing Cowart and her toddler, he pleaded guilty to them. He did this, he said, because he was already facing death, and a Jacksonville Sheriff’s detective, who has since died, threatened to charge his mother with the murder of Johnson, her boyfriend, if he did not.
His accusation couldn’t be verified in public records. A spokeswoman for the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said the agency does not negotiate agreements with defendants. Retired sheriff’s detectives and the case prosecutor did not respond to numerous inquiries about Bell’s case.
While some family members of Bell’s victims say his death sentence is warranted, others said he doesn’t deserve to be executed. “It could have happened to any one of us,” said West’s brother, Bimley West. He noted that his murdered brother’s son, Jimmie West, who was in prison for robbery with a gun, doesn’t believe Bell should die and signed a notarized document saying he didn’t want Bell to be executed.
Across town at her front door, witness Lora Hampton, 60, who escaped the bullets that claimed West and Smith in the parking lot that night, had little sympathy for him. “The world is not really safe with him free,” she said. “I think he more than rightly needed to be held responsible for the lives he took.”
But she also wondered about Dozier’s role in the violence.
“I think you are sending them for rehabilitation, you know, something to help change them,” she said. “But you’re showing them a whole other criminal path they could be taking.”
An Investigative Reporters and Editors Freelance Investigative Fellowship supported a portion of this work.
