14 year old eye witness to boot camp beating talked to the Miami Herald last year.

[madfloridian]

He gave a chilling account of the beating of Martin Lee Anderson. It is actually pretty thorough, and a well done article by the Herald reporter.

Boy, 14, tells of boot camp beatings

The screaming guards. The pressure points. The knee takedowns. The acrid ammonia stick shoved in the face of a rubber-legged 14-year-old named Martin Lee Anderson. Aaron Swartz can't forget any of it. Not because he saw it all the way most people did -- in a grainy videotape of the guards and Martin before his death -- but because Aaron was there, at Bay County Boot Camp, receiving much of the same violent treatment that still makes him shudder miles away from it all.

''They killed that boy. They didn't help him. They beat him,'' Aaron, also 14, told The Miami Herald in one of the first eyewitness -- and earwitness -- accounts of the dehumanizing experience of life at the Panama City lockup before, during and after Martin's arrival.

...."As Aaron tells it, time at the camp was measured in fear and pain, in increments of forced exercise, wall-slams, pressure points, knee takedowns and hammer-fist punches by DIs who video-taped it all. When the boys would go to bed, he said, they could hear the DIs watching the tapes in a nearby room, cheering on their greatest hits as if watching a sporting event.

He heard guards talking about it that night, he says.

Like Martin's family, Aaron thinks there's a coverup. He believes he overheard one guard repeatedly talking of ''revising'' and changing a report or reports, but he doesn't know which ones. He said around 6 p.m. on Jan. 6 a camp counselor told the boys Martin had died of natural causes -- only about two hours after Dr. Charles Siebert finished the autopsy.

..."But the ammonia didn't revive Martin. And soon they could hear the sirens. The boys were led inside. Martin was whisked away only hours after arriving at the camp.

He said a counselor told them "it was completely medical. . . . Athletes die every day, all the time, for medical reasons -- that healthy athletes stop and die so it's not unusual."

Aaron did not believe her. He told the reporter

"I don't think that's true at all. Even if it was medical, when he passed out, if they would have set him down and then gave him medical help right then, I think they could have saved his life and everything. But instead, they did all pressure-pointing, slammed him, beating up on him and everything."

Panama City, Bay County, Florida sounds like a tragically divided town which appears to be two cities.

Anderson trial tells two tales of a town

How small a town is Panama City? Just across the street from the courthouse where the guards and nurse are being tried sits the camp. Shut down like the rest in Florida after the video made national news, it sits abandoned, razor-wire gates rusty.

Tired of scenes of a boy collapsing and dragged upright again, I left and drove to where Martin lived. It is literally on the other side of the tracks, a scrubby street of ramshackle houses.

A few blocks over is the cemetery, the grass too high, fence sagging. He is there, flanked by stone angels, not a hero, not a monster, just gone.

What will the jury call what happened to Martin Lee Anderson? Sad comes to mind. And sorry. And wrong

A federal review of the case is underway since the verdict which found all 8 innocent.

There must need to be some healing there.