Late boy's family demands to see beating video

TALLAHASSEE - Martin Anderson's parents knew their 14-year-old son was in trouble. But the prospect of some faraway "boot camp" was more than they could handle.

They decided to put him in a juvenile facility just minutes from their Panama City, Fla., home. They would have no excuse not to visit.

It was a decision they now regret.

"Just like me signing his death over. Because that's what I did," Martin's mother, Gina Jones, 36, said Friday.

She held up pictures of her son in various stages of life, a young boy slowly transitioning to manhood. The last photograph showed Martin in an open casket. He was buried one day before his 15th birthday, the victim of an alleged beating by guards at the Panama City boot camp.

"He was only there for two hours," Jones said. "He never got a chance to know what bunk he was going to sleep in."

Martin died in early January at a hospital in Pensacola after being rushed from the boot camp. At first, the cause of his death was unclear. An initial medical report suggested he did not die from injury or trauma.

But this week, a Florida lawmaker watched the video and came away with a far more troubling conclusion: A half-dozen drill instructors beat Martin to death.

"It was surreal," said State Rep. Gus Barreiro, R-Miami Beach. "You're watching this and you wish you could reach inside the TV and say "Enough is enough."'

The video has stirred questions about boot camps and whether they effectively reshape troubled lives or represent a dangerous model based on intimidation and physical violence.

Though rebuked for talking about the video, which is part of a criminal investigation, Barreiro said he wanted the public to know as he heads into a legislative workshop next week on the boot camps.

So far only Barreiro and a handful of other officials have seen the video.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which is looking into the death, has refused to make it public, citing the investigation. The agency said it was considering showing the video anyway for fear "public perception will be based on hearsay rather than reality."

On Friday evening, Martin's parents called on officials to show them the tape, too.

"It's going to be hard but I want to see the video," his father, Robert Anderson, said in the office of the family's Tallahassee lawyer. "It'll answer a lot of questions... If (the drill instructors) were doing nothing wrong, then we can see it for ourselves."

The parents said they plan to sue Bay County and the state Department of Juvenile Justice, which oversees the state's six boot camp programs.

Officials for the Sheriff's Office and Department of Juvenile Justice said little Friday, also citing the investigation.

Martin was in trouble, his parents said, because he got arrested with his 13-year-old sister and four other youths after crashing their grandmother's Jeep Grand Cherokee in a shopping plaza parking lot.

They had taken the car for "joyride," Anderson said, adding the grandmother did not want to press charges.

But, they said, prosecutors charged them anyway. Martin was put on probation but violated it by breaking a 6 p.m. curfew, his parents said. With that, he was sentenced to 6 months in boot camp.

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