"Researchers excavating unmarked graves at a notorious reform school in the Florida Panhandle... have retrieved the remains of 55 bodies...."

"The exhumations mark a milestone in a painstaking effort to unravel the longtime mystery of what happened to scores of children who were sent to the former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Fla., and died...."

One of those hoping for answers is Ovell Krell, whose brother, George Owen Smith, was sent to Dozier in 1940 at the age of 14, allegedly for stealing a car with an older teen. The next year, the family received word that Owen had disappeared from the school and was later found dead of pneumonia. Although his parents asked the school to keep the body at a funeral home so they could retrieve it, the school buried him before they arrived, said Ms. Krell, 85 years old.

Unable to see Owen's body, his mother spent the rest of her life plagued with doubt. "Every night, she sat out on the porch, waiting to see if he could find his way home," Ms. Krell said. "My mother was never the same."