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Boot-Camp Body May Be Exhumed
Feb 24, 2006 9:10 pm US/Pacific
CBS 5 – San Francisco
(AP) PENSACOLA, Fla. The family of a
14-year-old who died last month after he was kneed, struck and
dragged by guards at a boot camp for juvenile delinquents plans to
exhume his body for a second autopsy, an attorney said.
 Martin Lee Anderson's family is disputing the
conclusion that he died from hemorrhaging caused by sickle cell
trait, a normally benign condition, and not from the 30-minute
altercation, which was captured by a camp security camera and later
broadcast nationally.
"We are working on the arrangements...,"
attorney Benjamin Crump said Friday. "Saying (Anderson) died of
sickle cell trait is like saying a man who was lynched died because
he had a weak neck."
The scenes from the tape outraged Anderson's
parents. His mother said it proved the guards killed her son,
despite a medical examiner's ruling that Anderson died from internal
bleeding unrelated to the confrontation.
 Crump said the family and the civil rights
group NAACP have asked that Dr. Michael Baden, a renowned forensic
pathologist who reviewed the medical evidence in the slaying of
civil rights leader Medgar Evars, be involved in the second autopsy.
Baden, co-director of the New York State Police
Medicolegal Investigation Unit, did not immediately return calls
left by The Associated Press at his New York office.
Anderson died early on the morning Jan. 6 at a
Pensacola hospital, hours after he collapsed while doing push-ups,
sit-ups, running laps and other exercises that were part of his
admission to the Bay County Sheriff's Office Boot Camp. He entered
the boot camp for a probation violation for trespassing at a school
after he and his cousins were originally charged with stealing their
grandmother's Jeep from a church parking lot.
The county sheriff's office, which runs the
camp, said Anderson was restrained after he became uncooperative.
But the camp also admitted that mistakes were made, CBS News
correspondent Jim Acosta reports.
The security video shows as many as nine guards
kneeing, hitting and dragging Anderson around the exercise yard. The
sheriff's office has said the guards were trying to get Anderson to
participate after he became uncooperative. No one has been charged
or fired.
Because of the controversy, Bay County Sheriff
Frank McKeithen said he plans to close the camp in three months. It
is one of six in the state, run by counties under state supervision.
An autopsy performed by Dr. Charles Siebert,
the medical examiner for Bay County, found Anderson died of
hemorrhaging caused by sickle cell trait, a normally benign blood
condition that affects about one in 12 black people.
Siebert said physical stress caused a cascade
of events ending in Anderson's red blood cells changing shape and
causing him to bleed to death internally.
Numerous medical experts have called the
finding unlikely. The state is investigating.
(© 2006 The Associated Press. All Rights
Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten,
or redistributed.)
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