Rotten Mango - #354: Acid POURED Down 6 Year Old Boy’s Throat & Body - South Korea’s “Acid Boy” Case
Episode Date: May 4, 2024He melted onto the street. He was 6 years old when he was walking down the street in South Korea. Someone walks up to him and pours sulfuric acid down his throat and all over his face. His clothes w...ere burnt black. The floor had bits of melted flesh. Third degree burns over most of his body - the boy had a 5% chance of survival. He was rushed to the hospital where he told the officers that the man - “Mr. Kim” who owned the fried chicken shop was running up behind him with the bag of acid. He was the one that did it! “Nonsense, acid is liquid. You can’t put it in a plastic bag - it will burn through the plastic.” That was the police’s response. Had they investigated properly - they would have realized… the fried chicken shop owner was indeed, a little strange. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Rumble
Hello
I am still feeling a little bit under the weather
So this episode is actually gonna be two cases that we've covered previously
Many years ago I wanna say
On a separate channel called Stephanie Sue
And I really think that these cases are just so unsettling, so bizarre
And I think that they should be talked about
There was a 6 year old in South Korea who had acid poured all over him,
and somehow it leads back to a chicken shop,
like a fried chicken store.
There was another case where 55 unmarked graves
behind a school for boys was uncovered.
So we're gonna dive deep into those cases today,
and we will be back on schedule on May 8th.
I'm gonna see you guys with brand new
Rotten Mango episodes, video and audio on May 8th. I'm gonna see you guys with brand new Rotten Mango episodes, video and audio on May 8th.
So far, I said scares me honestly any sort of acid scares me It scares me not in the same way that fire scares me if not, it scares me a little bit more at least for fire
I would hope that I'm in a position where I can see it first
Maybe I can smell it first before I get burnt.
But sulfuric acid is scary.
It kind of looks like water.
It just looks like a liquid.
At concentrated levels,
sulfuric acid is highly corrosive towards other materials.
It could burn rocks.
It could corrode metals.
Upon contact with human skin,
I mean, you're expecting a nightmare of a time.
This is not gonna be a joyous occasion You're expecting severe acidic chemical burns even secondary thermal burns. It's
Intense but sulfuric acid is pretty common. You can buy it online
I don't recommend that you do anything weird or fishy with it because for one ethics and morality
But two they're gonna trace it back to you
and morality, but two, they're gonna trace it back to you. Sulfuric acid is found in domestic drain cleaners you buy at Target, in lead acid batteries, in strong industrial
cleaners like it's everywhere. Even on a large scale, it's used in the water processing plants,
which all sounds like, you know, things that we need in life, things to sacrifice for the
greater good of, I don't know, filtering our poop. It's not the most corrosive acid. There's actually ones that are super corrosive that are
really hard to get your hands on. This is just a really relatively common one. And
sometimes it is used for murder. Owning a fried chicken shop sounds
glamorous, but it's not. You know, the business of fried chicken itself is
draining. To stand in front of a hot boiling vat of oil,
drenching each piece of chicken in a thick glob
of perfectly seasoned batter,
dropping it into the sizzling oil,
making sure not to burn your hand,
timing it so perfectly that the chicken is not too dry.
It's perfectly cooked on the inside and juicy,
but the outside has this crisp layer of crust
where you can run your knife through
and it's supposed to sound like tree bark.
And don't even get Mr. A started on the dinner rushes.
I mean, sure, it's better than having no business,
but it's exhausting.
So that morning, Mr. A, the chicken shop owner,
is in his little chicken shop, and it was pretty slow.
Nobody really wakes up and eats fried chicken at 11 a.m.,
except Stephanie. So Mr. A said that inside of his fried chicken shop that morning
He's thinking about the lunch rush that's coming ahead and then he heard the most ear piercing
Screeching noise. It sounded straight out of one of those horror movies where you've got the monster
You can't see it because it's foggy outside and they make these like, is that even a human noise? That was a noise. It almost sounded like a child
but it's not a kid that was out playing and having fun. It sounded like a kid
that was in trouble. So Mr. A drops everything, rushes out of his little
chicken shop and frantically looks for the source of the sounds. He didn't have
to look far. A little six-year-old boy was sitting near a pole on the street and his face was
Contorted in pain like literally twisted in pain. There were pieces of flesh
Seemingly hanging off of his own face. His face was burned and completely turning black
Blood was pouring out of it didn't even look like wounds at this point
You couldn't even decipher which part of his face was bleeding, if his body was bleeding.
It was... it was such a traumatic scene.
Blood was soaking his clothes. The cement sidewalk around this little boy had turned black.
It's almost as if a meteoroid had struck planet Earth, but only on this little boy, and that was it.
I mean, imagine, even where he's's standing the floor is completely scorched. The air around the little boy seemed to carry
this cloud of like very chemically scent. You know what is that scent? Have you
ever smelled sulfuric acid before? It was that scent. So he gets rushed to the
hospital and the little six-year-old boy's name was Tae Hwan. He was covered
in burns head to toe.
He couldn't see.
He was blinded from his attack.
And even then, he laid in that hospital bed and he tried to be positive.
He asked his parents if he could get the little robot shoes that he wanted later when he got
out.
And if he could eat all the ice cream in the world when he got out.
Even sang his favorite songs from his favorite cartoons.
There's interviews of him in bed, his entire body covered in bandages,
and his face is just like this bandaged mask
of medical gauze.
And I mean, when news broke of this incident,
the whole nation, like not even just the small town,
the entire nation of South Korea was confused
and shocked to say the least.
Because who on earth would be so disgustingly evil and vile
to not only do that to somebody, anybody, but to do it to a six-year-old little boy?
I mean this six-year-old probably has so much trust in the world. He's probably
excited and curious. I mean he's a little boy. How could somebody do that? It's just
not a normal thing. So when the little boy is asked, whose voice did you hear
when the acid was thrown on you? Did you see anyone?
Do you think you know who did it?
Tae took a moment and he said, the ajusshi from the chicken shop.
No the old man?
Yeah.
From the chicken shop?
Ajusshi is like anyone who's like, when you're a kid and when you're six, I called anyone
like 20 ajusshi.
But he is a little bit older.
I mean he's middle aged but Mr. A
he's accusing Mr. A
the guy that ran out of the chicken shop
literally to save this kid
of being the one to pour acid on him
what's going on?
so let's start from the beginning
May 20th was a normal day for everybody
or at least for Park Jung Suk and her 6 year old son Tae Won Tae
this was back in the day
when 6 year olds could so easily walk to school by themselves
Without anyone or anything just bothering them
Especially in this tiny little town in Korea
It's a safe area
Everything is everywhere
It's almost like this live work space
So you kind of have your shop at the bottom floor
And then a lot of people live on top of it
That's how I work, yeah
It's like a mixture of you know, you go downstairs and there's a hair salon But then right on top of it. There's- That's how I grew up, yeah. It's like a mixture of, you know,
you go downstairs and there's a hair salon,
but then right on top of it is somebody's apartment.
Yeah, it's like one of those places.
So school is very, very close by.
It's not like a dangerous city walk.
It's a nice small town where everybody looks out
for one another.
So Tae, he started on his journey to class
like he did every single day.
He had a routine. He took the same little alleyway every single day.
And this day, he was joined with his friend named Lee.
And like kids do, they were probably bouncing off the walls, you know, full of energy,
trying to face the day, giggling, poking at each other, you know, teasing each other.
They probably didn't even notice that a man had been watching them if not following them because when the man finally got his
chance he took it and it happened almost in the blink of an eye a
Man jumped out behind Tae grabbed onto his hair and of course, you know
Tae's gonna start screaming like would you not scream if somebody grabbed you by the hair?
Someone's like yanking your hair and not letting go, he starts screaming. But before anybody around could even register what the hell was going on,
it was almost instantly. This man poured a burning hot liquid down on top of Tae's head.
It slid down his forehead, onto his cheeks, into his eyes, into his mouth, down his throat,
down his neck. the stinging liquid seemed
to get everywhere. It was raining down onto this little boy's arms and chest
and legs now. It seemed like the liquid was on a mission to cover his entire
body as quickly as possible. So Tae lets out a high-pitched screech, but he
realized that anytime that he screamed his throat was burning.
It's like the liquid was choking him. So it was almost like this half screech, half
not a screech. He screamed a couple of times, but it wasn't what I would call
like a full force scream, but his mom heard. So his mom actually heard the
scream and he had not made it that far out of the house, right? And she was like
cleaning something and she heard it and I don't know if it's mother's intuition. I don't know if it sounded like Tae in the scream,
but she felt like it was her son. So she rushed through his little routine of which way he goes
and she sees her son leaned up against a pole on the sidewalk and she couldn't even recognize him.
She had always poked fun at his chubby little cheeks and had squeezed them with her fingers but now his face was just contorted in
pain. It was like twisted in pain. His entire face was like blackened. There was
blood all over his clothes. I mean I can't even imagine the trauma of seeing
your kid in this state. With the help of a few passerbys including the fried
chicken shop owner, Tae's mom gets Tae to the ER, and they confirm that Tae had been burned with sulfuric acid.
The effects were much worse on a 6 year old compared to, let's say a full grown adult.
6 year old's skin is so much more sensitive, and because the acid was poured from the top
of his head, Tae's head had the most injuries, followed by his chest, his back, and his arms.
About 40% of little Tae's tiny little body was burned, and a large portion of that area had third degree burns.
Which is the second worst level of burns. It's considered a full thickness burn.
This type of burn destroys two full layers of your skin. And instead of your skin turning red,
like when you accidentally touch a piping hot stove or something,
it'll appear sometimes white almost, or yellow,
but a lot of the times brown or completely blackened.
Like you've literally scorched it.
This type of burn can often damage the underlying bones, muscles, and tendons,
and it will definitely damage
nerve endings. It's just... it's a lot. So 40% of Tay's body was filled with
third-degree burns. To put that into better perspective, burns affecting 10%
of a child's body are considered major injuries. They require hospitalization
and extensive rehabilitation afterwards. 10%. And you say it went into his mouth.
And his eyes. He was blinded.
Oh my god.
So the probability of Tae's survival was only 5%.
I can't imagine telling this news to his parents, but somehow they both remained strong.
Both of them were devastated, but right now they felt like they needed to be strong for their son, you know?
Their son is showing courage and strength and trying to sing songs and trying to talk about ice cream
He was blinded, but he's still trying to remain positive
He's even comforting his own parents
And he only knew that his parents were in the room because of their voices
And I'm sure as a parent, you know, this is a really tough thing because you want your child to rest and you want them to recover
But at the same time, in order for your child to be safe, you know, whoever did this needs to be caught
So the parents they grab a tape recorder and they went into Tay's room to ask him
Everything that he remembered about the attack
They knew that every question that they asked every time that Tay responded or talked he was gonna be an agonizing pain
But he tried he said I was going to be in agonizing pain. But he tried.
He said I was walking to piano class with my friend, but not too long after I left the
house I heard an ajusshi call my name.
So I stopped and in that moment, some ajusshi came up to me and he looked like a monster.
He poured some liquid onto my face and the smell was so strong it felt like a burning
sensation everywhere.
Like he was throwing burning hot water down my face and even into my eyes and down my
Throat it was just everywhere on my skin
I tried to scream but when I screamed the hot liquid went down my throat and it hurt more
Now Tae wasn't really able to provide any information that would help catch this person
He just said that the ajusshi looked like a monster
It's it's really hard to chase someone down with that description.
But one thing that stood out was that the ajusshi, this guy, whoever did this, knew Tae's name.
So maybe instead of targeting Tae, because who's got beef with a six-year-old, they were targeting
Tae's parents. That makes more sense. This was like their sick revenge on the parents to hurt
their kid is the best way to get revenge on these adults, right? So the police, they want to talk to Lee, the friend that Tae was walking with to school.
Maybe he remembered something about the acid ajusshi. And Lee is this six-year-old boy and he had a hearing impairment.
He said he didn't even hear the ajusshi calling Tae's name,
but he did see an ajusshi and he did see him pour something out of a black plastic bag onto Tae's face.
So this is where it gets weird.
You know, the police were able to confirm that whoever did this was indeed an ajusshi.
But that was about it, you know?
I mean, the description of a monster...
Of course, when someone does something this horrendous to you,
they're gonna look like a monster in hindsight.
But what does that mean?
Lee couldn't give further description on this guy,
other than the fact that he was an older male.
They also said it was kind of confusing that Lee stated that the
acid was in a plastic bag that doesn't make any sense I mean it's a corrosive
material who puts that into like a little black shopping bag so a bunch of
professionals they tested the theory online because at this point the police
didn't even believe the kids they're like these kids don't know what they're
talking about clearly they're talking about.
Clearly they're traumatized.
Black plastic bag with acid?
I don't think so.
So these professionals, they even air this on news segments.
So shockingly enough, they were able to confirm
that a lot of black plastic bags seem to hold up well.
I guess maybe there is a lack of oxygen,
so it's not as corrosive.
Listen, I'm not a chemist, but just know
that the story made sense. Lee's story made sense. But then another confusing part is, how did somebody pour
out acid from a plastic bag without burning themselves? That sounds
harder than, let's say, putting that acid into a water bottle or some sort of
container, maybe a spray bottle. Like, maybe the bag is easier to trash? I'm not sure.
So again, that's not really leading us anywhere.
How did people even come up with the fried
chicken shop owner being the perpetrator?
Like, where did that come from?
It's so random.
So the parents, they had sat down with Tae and they had asked him about 300 hours
worth of questions, like they talked to this kid for 300 hours and recorded it all.
What? That's like...
Yeah.
What? 10, 15 days?
And during the 300 hours, every single time they said,
do you know who did this to you? Like, you know, he's saying,
I don't really remember the face.
What do you remember the voice when they yelled your name?
Like, who did that sound like?
And Tae kept saying, OK, well, it sounded like Mr. A from the chicken shop
and I think at first the parents were confused I mean I'm sure they believed it
in the beginning but I'm sure that also it didn't make sense so they asked are
you sure it was Mr. A because you know we've known him for years now and he's
the nice guy that owns the chicken shop I I'm sure it was Mr. A.
Are you sure it wasn't your teacher from school?
Was it this person?
That person or a stranger?
It was Mr. A.
So the parents, they're infuriated,
they're upset and they're thinking about it.
They're like, wait, okay, this is crazy.
Maybe it does make sense.
So Mr. A, the chicken shop owner, which by the way, that's not
his real name, we just legally have to call him Mr. A right now, he was short on cash a couple days
before Tay's incident happened. He had gone from neighbor to neighbor asking to borrow money and
his shop was right across the street from Tay's house. It was a pretty sad moment. He had knocked on the door and he was so desperate
that he even got down on his knees to Tae's parents to beg for money to keep his shop open.
But Tae's own parents, they weren't doing that well. They were financially stressed and they
couldn't spare the extra money and it was a large sum of money. So they refused. Maybe, maybe he was
so angry that he felt
like he had to get back at Tae's parents and his best idea was to go after Tae?
But that doesn't even make sense. So the parents keep asking Tae and like I said
again all of this is recorded and Tae said he was certain it was the chicken
shop owner and prior to all of this none of his story was nonsensical. He wasn't
like, and then I rode on a broom and I hovered into town and then I was going
to Hogwarts.
Like this six year old kid is like, yeah, I was going to piano lessons.
He's very straightforward.
He remembers the day very clearly.
It didn't sound like a kid that was confused and filling in his memory holes.
What's wild though, is that the family told the police all of this, showed them the tapes,
and the police did not believe them.
So the police were like, I think it's just neighborly drama, like I get it, you guys want justice, but the parents are being a little bit crazy.
And the parents are like, we're not being crazy, here, watch these tapes.
They watch it, and the police are like, ah, see?
That question that you just asked, you probably don't know this because you're not a police officer like myself, but you are leading Tae.
You are leading him into giving you that answer. Why don't they want to
just investigate the dude? I don't know they didn't even try to see if the
chicken shop owner had an acid purchase history which buying acid at that time
especially at this concentration it was pretty difficult like it was 78% pure
sulfuric acid so it's not like he got drain cleaner and poured it down the
kid's throat so they didn't even investigate
I guess the police really didn't think it was the chicken shop owner
They always kept saying why would he help bring Tae to the hospital then? That doesn't make sense
Who holds a grudge for something so unreasonable? On top of that we brought him in for a lie detector test and he passed
An officer even said, you know, it's our job not just to listen to one side of the story
But both sides and it feels like Tay's parents are pushing this narrative
They're really pushing for it and honestly that kind of makes us mad. They're impeding with the investigation
So how do you explain Tay?
Constantly remembering that it was a chicken shop owner. Well, you know what adults say
They say the six-year-old has a vivid imagination,
a fantastic memory.
They're just thinking about these things.
But some neighbors reported it wasn't that crazy.
It wasn't a vivid imagination,
because some of them reported seeing noticeable burn scars
on the chicken shop owner's hands
shortly after what happened today.
And apparently, Mr. A's leather shoes were corroding,
which you know, it's not just worn,
it's not like the soles are worn out.
It looks like it's corroding,
like it's been dipped into a vat of acid.
That's a very different look.
Which side note, the police didn't even take
Mr. A's clothes in for testing until four months later.
And they just bunched all of his clothes and his shoes
into one evidence bag, so all of it was bunched together and it all tested positive for acid
But again, Mr. A is like, yeah because I carried Tae partly to the hospital
So, of course, I'm gonna have some acid on the clothes that I was wearing that day
The police just said yeah makes sense and regardless we can't even use that as evidence because we stored it wrong
So we were supposed to put the shoes separate.
Our bad.
Other experts said that doesn't make any sense.
It didn't look like the damage done to somebody's clothes when they were just in close proximity to someone that had acid on their clothes.
Does that make sense?
It looks like a more intimate contact.
Later, neighbors reported seeing just straight up burns on Mr. A's hands.
And when they questioned him about it on Mr. A's hands, and when they questioned
him about it, Mr. A just said, oh, it's because I helped Tae-Won to the hospital, so of course
I'm also going to have burns on my hands, because the acid from his body transferred
to mine. I'm Tanks and Atra. And I'm Investigator Slater. And together we co-host a podcast called Psychopedia, which is a true crime podcast infused with
comedy making it a crime-ity.
Each week, Investigator Slater brings us a wild and thoroughly researched true crime
case.
I'm here to digest it all and react just like you probably are right there on the other
side of the microphone.
Somehow, I've got to present each case with the detail and respect it deserves while also
cracking up at Tanks' perfectly timed humor and thought-provoking questions.
Listen to and follow Psychopedia on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Other neighbors had other suspicions. Like, how did he even hear Tay's screams to begin with?
Some neighbors reported it was a piercing sound, but they were very close to Tae.
Other neighbors who were near the chicken shop, like outside the chicken shop, said,
I didn't even hear a scream.
So how would he have heard a scream if he was inside the chicken shop where there's
music playing, a TV on, and you know, the kitchen noise is loud in a restaurant.
Just the whirring of the refrigerator and the stove
How could he have heard that so they tested it by playing a radio at like 80 decibels
Which is what they consider a child's loudest scream. They went into the chicken shop. They couldn't hear a single thing
They could barely hear it outside the chicken shop
So there's no way that he could have heard something
Then a ton of neighbors came out to say, wait,
I didn't even see him running from the direction
of the chicken shop.
I don't know where he came out of.
But then one neighbor came out and said,
I actually saw Mr. A running towards Tay
but from the opposite direction of the chicken shop.
Like if the chicken shop is here, Tay is here,
I saw him come this way.
Oh, that's weird.
Then he's lying.
Yeah.
So when the police asked him about it and when the neighbors were questioning about
it, he was like, what are you talking about?
I ran out of the chicken shop and I was running and because Tae wasn't screaming anymore,
I didn't know where he was.
So I ran past the source of the noise only to realize, oh, it's that little boy up against
the pole.
So I U-turned it back.
Later, he said, oh, it was because there was a lady in my way,
so I ran around her, and I guess someone had seen me
looking like I was coming from the other direction,
but it was just because I ran around somebody to get to Tay.
None of this makes sense, because I don't know.
This is a very small street,
I'm gonna put a picture right here.
It's a very tight street.
It's not one of those massive intersections. Tae was leaned up against the pole. The sidewalk around him was scorched.
His whole face was blackened. There was blood all over his shirt. Like this is what his shirt looked
like. How do you run past him? And like I would imagine if I see a kid in that level of distress
and there's a lady in my way, I'm not just gonna like jog around her I think I might be like move lady like it's going down we got to save this
kid you know it just was all bizarre but the police decided it was not enough to
prosecute Mr. A even at the parents urging the police said that they
couldn't do anything as there was insufficient evidence so apparently a
six-year-old's memory is not enough evidence even though many experts have
studied the 300 hours of tapes
and they said, sure, kids can lie.
They can make up imaginative stories.
Maybe they want to protect themselves
from this traumatic incident.
Maybe they don't know what they're talking about.
But Tae was asked multiple times in different variations
who did it.
And each time he responded confidently
that it was Ms. Jerae from the chicken shop.
So the child behavior experts believed Tae, but the police didn't. And after 49 long hard days of
fighting with death, at 8 in the morning on July 8th, Tae-Won passed away.
And Tae's case would become one of the most famous unsolved cases in all of South Korea.
Tae would actually go on to change South Korea law forever during the short
amount of time that Tae was alive. and a little bit afterwards honestly, South Korea had a statute of
limitations for murder 15 years after the time of death of the victim. Meaning
if you kill someone and you get caught 15 years and one day later you're gonna
be a free man. You just got away with murder. So they said that this was there
so that it would protect citizens from police officers who wanted to frame
people for murder, I guess
20 years after the fact, or I guess they were saying evidence at that point would be really hard to prove
because it's been so long
So that was in place. Yeah, it's just bizarre
So Tae's parents fought to have that law changed
And it worked
The TaeWon Act was put in place and it went back
So I think it was in like the 2010s that it was put in place, but they went back to August 1st of 2000.
Any homicide that happened afterwards would have no statute of limitations.
But Tae's murder happened even before then.
And the statute of limitations for his murder was going to be up in 2014.
So Tae's parents tried to include Tae-won into the Tae-won
Act but their appeals were rejected and rejected by the Supreme Court. Tae's mom
even went to the streets every single day to protest but there was nothing
that could be done. It just felt so unfair and depressing like the fact that
Tae would change all of South Korea and help victims but he himself would never
get justice. It just feels... How does that work?
Yeah, it just feels so depressing.
And they name it his name?
Wow.
But they couldn't use that to help him.
No.
Like this law is groundbreaking
and I'm sure you can already understand the scope of it
which is to put it into perspective.
A lot of serious crimes have been prosecuted
because of Tae and his law, including one of the most notorious serial killers in all of South Korea, the Hwasong serial killer.
And that was all thanks to the Tae-won case.
And to Tae-won's law.
But the statute of limitations closed for his case in 2014 and this is one of the most infuriating but also most
prominent case of an unsolved murder in South Korea because who does that to a
six-year-old? So they nobody that's it? The chicken
shot owner just went on to live his life? Went on to live his life. We don't know
his name? No I believe we know his last name. But he's still very private. Yes.
The justice system is supposed to serve the parents of victims and the families of victims, but a lot of the times
you see the families trying to reform law to get justice. But the law should have been on their side to begin with.
Like there should have never been a statute of limitations for murder or even rape.
What are your thoughts on this case?
Do you guys think it was the chicken shop owner?
And do you really think it was because his parents
refused to loan him money?
Which sounds like the most entitled evil thing
I've ever heard.
Jack was walking through the building
and it definitely was not what he was expecting, like at all.
I mean, what do you expect when you hear the dozier school for boys?
Maybe you're thinking rows and rows of desks, maybe a campus with other activities, sports, a big cafeteria.
It had all of those things, it did. None of them were well kept, but there was more.
Past all of that, there was where the areas where the boys would sleep and would spend most of their time, where they were kept.
I mean, it's supposed to be a place to help children, right?
But instead, Jack said it looked like a prison.
The whole place felt grimy and dark and depressing.
Like, right when you walk in, there's this suffocating feeling and you can't even quite put your finger on it.
It seemed like body odor was the smell maybe that's what was so
suffocating it was heavy it lingered long after you left and why on earth does
this place this school for boys smell so strongly of urine Jack didn't have to
wonder long he would get those answers immediately being a teacher of
delinquent kids at a short-term like residential center in I believe Tallahassee, Florida
Jack found it really hard to keep walking because it genuinely looked
like a prison for boys. he asked one of the guards, yeah there's guards in this
place. Jack asked the guard, are there kids in here? yeah. I want to meet one. how
about in this cell? and jack is looking the cell up and
down and there's locks and bolts up and down the whole thing and the guard is like hold on this
lock is a little bit fussy so he goes and grabs something and comes back with the holy bible
and he whacks the lock with the holy bible and it comes undone. Yeah, this is how just horrible and deplorable this place is.
Jack walks in inside the concrete box and he sees on top of another concrete slab, like
there's no mattress in here.
He sees a tiny little boy and he looks so thin.
He looks like he could disappear into the walls.
He looked terrified.
He had no pajama bottoms, no shirt, his head was shaven, and Jack sits down next to the
young boy and is like, how long have you been in here?
And he just shrugged.
So the guard answers for him and he's like, oh, he's been in here a while.
But it's for his own protection.
The other boys were sodomizing him.
What?
Well, why is his head shaved?
Oh, because he was pulling out his hair. Well, is he his head shaved? Oh, cuz he was pulling out his hair.
Well, is he getting any help? That's not normal for a kid to do.
And the guard just shrugs and is like, we just passed the food in through the cell.
So Jack is disgusted. He's horrified.
Listen, there had been a lot of rumors and talks about what had been going on in here.
I mean, a few years before Jack even arrived, a reporter visited the school
and found that a 16-year- old boy was placed in solitary confinement, yeah
like prison, and his name was Jim and Jim had consumed a full glass light bulb
because he was losing his mind in solitary confinement and then he used
pieces of the glass light bulb to gash his arm a dozen times and nobody, no
guard, no teacher, teacher no staff member nobody cared
so you're like okay well how on earth is the school open in the middle of the state of freaking
florida sunny sunshine and oranges a reporter saw that a teacher saw that abuse why wasn't the
school immediately shut down and the administrators arrested let's talk about the dozier school for boys. the dozier school for boys was actually known as
the Florida school for boys originally. they opened in 1900 and you're like oh
okay so this case is like from a million years ago. the school was formally shut
down in 2011. it was open for over a hundred years and when it was finally
shut down there was a massive graveyard found with countless children buried in the back that nobody knew for a hundred plus
years. I find that very hard to believe, don't you? So this is how the Florida
School for Boys was marketed. If you look at this picture, I mean, yeah, it's
horribly color enhanced. It looks like it's just they just turned the saturation
up, but it feels picturesque, doesn't it't it you know the property is not fenced there's no electric barbed wire
it's covered by well-manicured lawns it has pine trees maybe some palm trees it
kind of looks like a college campus the school apparently offered activities
like football and you could join the band and or the Boy Scouts obviously
they did not advertise the unmarked graves because you know know, if you didn't know about those kinds of things,
maybe it sounded like the dream, a paradise of sorts. And the only way that you could get into that school was to be a bit of a troublemaker.
Now, the definition of troublemaker is really loose. Like, what I think a troublemaker is different from what a random cop might think a troublemaker is.
So who's to say? That meant a lot of the kids were just thrown into the school if adults were just tired of dealing with them for whatever reason.
So, I mean, the students really vastly were different.
So some could be as bad as they've committed acts of sexual violence or assaulted other people,
and then another kid would have been thrown into the dozier school for boys just because they were caught smoking a cigarette,
or maybe they skipped a few classes.
So I mean you had a really weird mix of kids in there.
Now Ed Adams was a former student of dozier.
He got out alive and he tried to live his best life.
Ed got married, had children, and for decades life was just never what he expected.
He thought when he got out of dozier, life would change, things would get better, he saw his neighbors, he saw friends, and they
all had yeah they all had troubles in life okay they weren't perfect but don't
get me wrong they all slept well most of the time. They didn't have the
nightmares that Ed had or the trauma or the PTSD but the nightmares he said the
nightmares were the worst. He would always see the one-armed man in his
nightmares and it would defuel his depression. it was like the only fuel that he was getting
because Ed went from a healthy 165 pounds to less than a hundred pounds. I
mean he couldn't eat, he couldn't sleep, he couldn't keep anything down, he was
abusing antidepressants, he was spiraling into his illness and his family, they're
trying to help but but at night it was the worst because his family would fall asleep and Ed would toss and turn he
couldn't sleep he was scared of the dark at like 60 years old so in an attempt to
try and feel better he starts writing a diary at night and he pours out his pain
onto page after page and he said it was just as painful to exist like it hurt to
exist it hurt to exist it hurt
to just sit down or lie down because he didn't have any muscles or fat tissue he
was emaciated he he didn't even have any of that to cushion his bones but it
wasn't even the physical pain that got him it was the memories whenever he
closed his eyes he was back in that room that bloody white room and then there
was that one-armed man raising his arm with the leather strap and the belt would
hit the ceiling of the low roof and come crashing down straight onto Ed's body
and he would squirm in pain. Ed wrote, when I was dragged in that room I knew
something bad was going to happen to me. I was placed onto a small bed it's about
three feet wide five to six feet long The bed was near the floor and it had this filthy mattress on it.
I was told to hold on to the end of the bed railings and not move or cry.
And then I remember the sound of something cutting the air, followed by a pain that I can't even describe.
The most horrible pain a human being can imagine. I mean, it hurt so terribly badly.
I would try and
move to get up from the bed thinking God please make them stop beating me but
they beat me and they beat me so bad. In another entry, Ed wrote, I can't write
about this anymore. God make them stop. Another one, God please stop this. And in
2009, Ed passed away but he left a note for his wife and children,
and it was like his last will and testament.
So he had two dying wishes.
Ed wrote, the first wish was that he wanted to transfer
his Elvis songs from cassette to a disc,
and the other wish was to tell everybody
how he had been abused at the Florida school for boys.
And that's what they would do, his whole family.
So a lot of victims started to come out over the time and they were talking about their trauma their mental emotional
Physical sexual abuse and this is crazy
They were like seniors when they came out about the abuse stories
So many victims had already passed a lot of them were in jail. I mean, it's crazy
Okay, let's they called themselves the white house boys
because it happened in the white house. so you're like whoa. the white house? okay not that one. that
one is the most secure building in the entire country. this white house that we're talking about
today was the most dangerous. it was a shed, a small building. it looked more like a shed. here
this is a picture of it. it's essentially like four walls and a door and a few windows. The roof was low and completely flat.
I mean imagine just a box. The building itself was painted white and the windows had this green molding
but most of them were boarded up so you couldn't even see inside.
It was a far cry from the Oval Office like this is not plush or fancy or for high-powered protected people.
It looks like that. If the outside isn't bad, the inside is gonna shock you
the walls inside were white and they were smeared with vomit, grime, and blood
there's one portion of the wall where there's a bloody print
like someone had placed their bloody fingertips and just dragged it down the wall
and when you walk in, I mean the whole place makes your eyes water
because all you can smell is this thick stench of blood and sweat and urine and a
hint of whiskey
Inside the room. There's only just a bed and that's it
The mattress is caked in vomit and blood and if you were brought into the White House and this was your first time
There was no warm welcome
There was this one-armed man is what all the students called him. The one-armed man would throw you down onto the mattress face down and he would tell
you to hold on to the railings of the bed. So you're holding on to the bed
frame. Maybe if you really want you can bite down on the pillow so you don't
scream or maybe it'll help with the pain but the pillow is caked in blood and
vomit. And the one-armed man was getting ready. He was holding a leather strap. He
had different sizes. It was like his little toolbox
The students would lie down and they heard it before they felt it. That's what they all said
They would hear him shuffling his feet as if you're getting ready to I don't know throw the bowling ball down the lane
Like you're preparing for something
It's like you needed to get into position like he's about to do a set at the gym
And then you would hear the leather belt cut cut the stale air, and then smack on the ceiling
before falling straight onto you.
And then the boy said that you would feel the pain.
And the worst part was you could almost time the pain.
It was always the same.
The shuffling of the feet, the whip cutting the air, then smacking the ceiling and then
onto you.
If you were lucky, you would get a few dozen whips.
If you were unlucky, you would get over a hundred whips in one time.
All the students could barely walk out of the White House.
They would have to pull, because they were still clothed when this happened.
Their clothes would be embedded in the lacerations because the whip was so powerful.
So they would have to peel the clothes off of their bloody skin. The first time was rough but somehow the
staff at Dozier made sure that each time you were dragged into the White House it
would be worse. It was a level of like sadistic cruelty that is just unheard of.
Sometimes the staff would drag two to three boys in at a time and sometimes if
they were mad at you for whatever it was, they would drag you out of your bed in the dark of night and you would be dragged by your
arms through the lawns into the White House for your beating you're like okay
what the hell did they do like obviously nobody deserves that but what on earth
are they so mad about like what did you do it could have been the smallest
freaking thing Johnny Lee Gaddy was punished in the White House because one
of the other students a six-year- boy, fell into the mud and Johnny tried to
help him get up. And the staff was like, we don't like that. If the six-year-old
boy fell in the mud, the six-year-old boy should fucking struggle to get up. Okay
before we get into all of that, let me tell you about Johnny first. Johnny was
black and this is kind of important to the story. He was 11 years old and this
is in like the the 50s and 60s. I mean if you think
there's raging racism right now, which there is, think back then. Like it was
pretty evident that there was so much racism. I mean just look at Dozier. Back
in the day, the white kids and minorities were separated. They were
segregated. And it seemed like the police and teachers were more than happy to
send more black boys to Dozier. I believe it was like two-thirds black kids and one-third like white kids. What kind of school is it?
It's a reform school for bad boys
So, I mean you could be sent for literally anything
That's why it's hard to say it was for bad boys and I'm not even making this up
Johnny was sent to dozier for a stutter
And I'm not even making this up. Johnny was sent to dozier for a stutter
He had a stutter and the kids bullied him relentlessly and he was so stressed out that he skipped school
The police came to his house to see him and told him pay you skipped school So we need to take you before a judge because you skipped school
The cop lied there was no judge Johnny was thrown in jail
He's 11 just to remind you, and he waited hours.
The cop walked by the cell and was like, hey, and I quote, hey boy, get up.
And he's like, uh, where's the judge? And he said, N-word, you're going to Dozier.
Yeah, there was no judge. That's how Johnny found himself at Dozier.
It was bad. The minute that he got there, one of the staff members got up in his face and said, and I quote,
boy, your life is gonna change.
And it did. I mean, the whole, his whole life turned into a nightmare.
Johnny spent every waking moment of his days in Dozier performing free, hard labor.
He had to work on the farm. He had to tend to crops, raise and slaughter livestock.
Again, another friendly reminder that he's freaking 11 years old,
but he's waking up at 6am to do hard manual labor.
He wasn't even one of the youngest boys there. There were boys as young as 6 and 7 years old.
Like, I don't know how on earth to even make it make sense.
Like, the kids are skipping school because you're being bullied, so to teach him not to skip school because you're being bullied,
you send him to a school that is more on par with a concentration camp from North Korea, like...
Tell me how that makes sense
Johnny said Dozier was a bad boy school and I was labeled as a bad boy but we
had boys that were just six years old at dozier and I would always wonder what could a six-year-old do that was so
bad that they were sent to dozier and you're like okay how is this legal? how
are the cops sending boys here? how is this even operating? the school made it
seem like the boys were just helping produce food for the other students and
for the staff like a little school garden but the school was actually
selling produce for profit.
And they were making quite a bit of profit.
Like I'm talking hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit.
They're doing that for some money?
Yeah.
And most of the boys in the school were black.
So black unpaid child labor for large profits.
So just like 1865 never happened.
I mean, this is 1950.
Like sure, it's a long time ago from today
But it's still not the 1800s long ago, and that's not even that long ago if you really think about it
But like are we not seeing how alarming and terrifying that is and the boys weren't allowed to interact with each other
They weren't allowed to even help each other again very reminiscent of and again
and maybe that's very inflammatory to say but very reminiscent of slavery and that is why Johnny was punished a teacher threw
Johnny and a six-year-old boy let's call him Frank they were thrown out to go
cut down a tree which like again this kid is 11 and the other kid is 6 do I
need to remind you like how are you gonna cut down a tree it was a big tree
so the Karen or whoever threw them out was like, here take this two-handed saw. Do you know what like a two-handed saw is? There's a handle on
each side. It's very long. You need two people to like saw it back and forth, right? Yeah. Johnny
said Frank could barely hold the handle. I mean of course. He said he was so weak and little when
Johnny pushed like this, Frank would just fall down onto the ground. So Johnny is trying to help
him back up because he knows that they're going to the white house
if they don't cut down this damn tree and if they don't do it freaking fast.
and when the staff saw him help the six-year-old boy, they got mad.
they were like, why are you helping him?
and they dragged both of them into the white house to be punished.
and johnny says that he still remembers the smell.
the blood stain on the walls, the one-armed man who made him bite down on a vomit covered pillow and
he remembered the man warning him you better hold on tight it's for your own
good Johnny was confused but then the first
blow came and then the pain made his ears ring and he he let go of the
railing and that was like the worst thing he could have done because the blows were so fast and they were so strong that his body was bouncing around the mattress
and the man did not wait for him to get his grip on the railing again
had he flipped over, the power of the blow would have easily ruptured his testicles
it would have easily killed him
the one-armed man yelled at him for trying to be a smart N-word for letting go and
hit him on the back and his head.
So when the beating was over, Johnny had lacerations all over his body and he was drenched in blood and
instead of letting him go to a nurse, Johnny was told to go to the cafeteria so he could send a message
to all the other boys that, and I quote, were not playing with you boys.
all the other boys that, and I quote, were not playing with you boys.
But that's not all.
Johnny was repeatedly beat, sexually assaulted,
and emotionally manipulated at Dozier.
I mean, it wasn't just in the White House.
There was a lot of sexual assault going on in Dozier.
From the staff and from the other boys,
who honestly, they're being beat, they're being traumatized.
This is a breeding ground for creating violent offenders
and serial killers, if I'm being honest.
And the worst part is technically, technically Johnny is considered one of the lucky boys.
Because at least he made it out alive. That's what they would tell him.
So there had been some boys that tried to run away and
this is like straight out of the movie. Dozier allegedly had dogs
that they would release and the dogs would tear you apart so that you could be brought back to the school but sometimes the kids never made it back. now originally johnny thought
okay well maybe they succeeded in running away or maybe they didn't or who knows right? or sometimes
kids would go into the white house and they would never come back. again you're like what does that
mean? one time a student went to the white House to be punished and he saw another boy, severely
injured and limp in the corner and he was not moving.
And one day, Johnny was taking trash out to be burned in this big garbage pit that they're
just incinerating the fire and in the trash pile, he noticed something that looked like
a human hand and he pointed it out to his friend and was like, oh my god
Is that a freaking hand and his friend looks at him and is like shh
Don't ever repeat that don't ever do that again because you're gonna be in the pile next
Nobody wants anyone to find out what's happening here
So are they killing boys? Well, those your school records show admittance dates for a ton of boys, but no release date.
I mean, sure, you could call it bad record keeping because the school's been open for over a hundred years,
but I don't think so.
The White House boys, a group of survivors that came together to seek justice in 2009,
by then, like I said, most of them were seniors and it was heartbreaking.
One of them named Stu said that before he went into the White House for a beating he was waiting outside He could hear all of his friends screaming inside for their lives
he bent over and picked up this small pebble that caught his eye and
He was rolling it between his fingers and he just noticed how smooth it was and how good it felt
He kept it in his pocket
mm-hmm for the rest of his life and
Later when he was telling this story 50 60
years later he still had that pebble it was like his own little safety net like
the stories were so heart-wrenching there was so much public attention around
the survivors and finally the state of Florida launched an inspection and like
mind you the school opened in 1900 and at this point in 2009 the school was still operating
The school was still open. Are they doing the same thing though? Yeah, they're still pretty abusive
I don't know about the White House still being open
But there was a lot of assault by the guards like it was straight-up prison if not worse
So the state of Florida launched an inspection and Dozier failed the inspection and was finally shut down in 2011 and if you're like wait what about the beginning of the story what about
Jack did he not call the police on dozier about what he saw what about the
reporter that went they did they try to draw attention but nobody cared
authorities inspected dozier found horrible things like the fact that the
boys were being forced to lie down on their stomachs and then their wrists and
ankles were shackled together they they were hog-tied.
Just for hours on end. Dozier at this point wasn't even trying to hide anything, but the authorities would just slap a warning on their door and move on.
Even just three years into opening Dozier, it's not like over time the cookie got rotten,
do you know what I mean? Like it was immediate. Just three years into opening Dozier, they were
involved in a scandal
Authorities had found boys as young as five years old being beaten shackled and starved and hired out as free labor
So like if you owned a farm nearby in Florida, you could hire these random boys for free
But the school was like I pinky pinky promise that we're gonna do better and the authorities were like okay fine you silly goose we trust you and the school remained open but
this time all they changed was that they made the boys right home about how much
they loved it at school how much fun they were having how much they loved boy
scouts and football like the school promise that they had and then not too
long after that there was a fire at the school six boys and two staff members died
Because they were trapped in the dorm now authorities were like wait
What do you mean? They were trapped in the dorm?
Yeah, well we lock it so they can't escape
So they burnt to death because you locked the doors because you're treating them like prisoners
Yeah, precisely
Instead of shutting down the school,
they were just like we're gonna fire the superintendent and you guys need a new superintendent
and that is how arthur dozier took over the school. he was a really humble dude, so humble in fact
that he renamed the school from florida school for boys to dozier school for boys. and that year,
the first year on the job, the governor of florida visited and found the place in shambles like they had no shame
They were like governor come on over. Let me show you the details. Let me show you this kid
That's been honked. I'd this one's been in solitary confinement. I mean he's ripping out his hair, but it's fine, right you get it governor
I
Mean the walls were broken there were leaking ceilings buckets were used as toilets, bunk beds were crammed into the room to accommodate overcrowding, like there was
no heat in the winter, the governor said it was like walking into a training
ground for a life of crime, like they're breeding criminals in here. honestly some
prisons might have been safer and more sanitary, yet the school kept running
like the governor visited and was like this is gonna create criminals, but the
school kept running. the authorities were like, just can you not
take too many people in?
And eventually, Dozier School for Boys
did get security cameras later on, right?
But legend has it, the workers would smear Vaseline
onto the cameras to make it super blurry.
So you can't see much, but a video did get out in 2007
of a young 18-year-old boy named Justin Caldwell,
who is being
assaulted by the guards. the guards just grabbed him by the throat and slammed
him down onto the ground and dragged Justin to the center of the room and you
can see that he's bleeding from his head and his legs are twitching. so yeah, 2007.
I mean like you can just imagine the sheer number of victims at dozier in
the past 100 plus years. the survivors
are suffering from depression, PTSD, a lot of them turn to alcohol, drugs, crime,
some of them can barely sleep through the night, they have nightmares, others
can't seem to stay in a relationship or even like be around their family members.
a lot of them went on to be hardened criminals to rob and kill and I'm not
absolving them of their crimes because
not that I have that authority to begin with but don't you feel like the boys
would have been better just I don't know being light troublemakers I mean this
like really cemented a horrible future for the boys one survivor said and I
quote I survived Vietnam and I survived Dozier and Dozier being the hardest of
the two and in 2012 after one year of being shut down, the state authorized a forensic
anthropology survey by the University of South Florida. Because there had been so
many rumors and more talks, one survivor remembered that he and another boy were
forced to dig three holes in the ground outside the cafeteria in the dead of night.
And they later went on to say, all the staff told us was the hole
should be four feet deep and when we asked how long should the hole be they
told them to fit a boy well the anthropologists went out there they
documented nearly 100 deaths and they found 50 unmarked graves yeah behind the
school three times as many black students as white students were buried
at dozier.
And in 2017, the state held a formal ceremony
to apologize personally to two dozen survivors
and two families of other victims.
And in 2019, during a preliminary survey work
for a pollution cleanup, because also side note,
a lot of buried bodies causes concern
for sanitation safety for humans.
It's like a biohazard, right? Especially unmarried graves when they're not in coffins.
It's a lot and it's just like a whole thing, okay? So they ran out there for like a pollution cleanup
and they found another 27 suspected graves, hinting that there would be a lot more bodies than
previously suspected
buried around Dozier. There's actually a book written by the leading
anthropologist that worked on the Dozier site. It's called Carry Their Bones and
she remembered asking a courthouse archivist for records of the boys at the
school, right? And the archivist sharply corrected her and said,
you mean the inmates? This is like a hundred years later. I mean the school
has been closed down. Like what does she have against these boys? She
doesn't even know these boys. And when she couldn't come up with all the
records, the anthropologist is like, that's it? The archivist is like, yeah
well there's not a lot of records on the inmates because, and I quote, they was
just throwaways. And that is the story of the dozier school for boys this has been
highly requested and it's like the most mind-boggling thing that I don't know
why going into it I was like oh it's probably a school that closed down in
like I don't know 1920 the fact that it was still open in 2010 is insane and the
fact that it was open for that long Can you just imagine the sheer number of victims? I don't think we'll ever really get an accurate victim count
it's probably in
Tens of thousands. I heard like there's some similar ones in China, too
I heard there's even ones going on like nowadays. Maybe you can talk about it. It's
Traumatizing like some of of these schools will do to kids.
I think it reminds me of like mental institutions, like psychiatric institutions, because I think
the whole mindset is, oh, well, these boys are bad boys. So we can't trust anything
they say. They just want to get out. They're being sneaky. They're being manipulative.
They just want to be free so that they can, I don't know, get involved in petty theft and hang out with their other bad influence friends.
It's like the psychiatric institutions. They're like, oh no, don't trust what they're saying because they're a little bit cuckoo.
So nobody really gives it much thought and that is insane to me. Like, what are your thoughts genuinely?
I think that this is worse than prison. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.