Chapter 2

I was talking with someone from Sebring’s Black community at the town depot one night when the town whistle blew. “Do you know why they blow that whistle every night at 9 p.m. and every morning at 7 a.m.?” he asked. He then described a dark side to this small, ordinary Central Florida town that, as a newcomer, I didn’t know about.

The Black community is located on the east side of the railroad tracks. The mostly white community is on the west side. Years ago, the people of color would line up at 7 a.m. on the east side of the tracks until the whistle blew. That signaled that they could walk or drive across the tracks to work or shop. But by 9 p.m., they were expected to be back on the east side.

The east side was poor and run down compared to the spritely west side with its white-columned buildings and neat sidewalks.  Its primary residents were Blacks, Cubans, Latinos, and immigrants, many of whom first came to Florida to work in the orange groves and cane fields. If they didn’t make it back to their side of the tracks by 9 o’clock, they ran the risk of being harassed and bullied by the good ol’ boys from the Sheriff’s Department and all-white fire station, he said.  Then he leaned forward and, as if to make his point crystal clear, told me about the time the Sebring Sheriff’s Department made him dance like a monkey on the back of a pick-up truck.

I had a hard time believing what my new friend had told me. According to the Greater Sebring Chamber of Commerce, Sebring is best known for its “warm hospitality and welcome sprit,” NASCAR International Speedway, and historic downtown. Founded by George Sebring in 1912, the “City of the Circle” lakeside community was designed with a circular plan to attract businessmen and entrepreneurs. Outside the city, the countryside is known for cattle ranches and citrus groves. It’s the county seat of Highlands County, with 1,029 square miles and a population of about 100,000.

At least that’s the PR we were given when we first decided to invest our savings into the “land of our dreams.” But Sebring turned out to be not quite as friendly and hospitable as the business community, Chamber brochures, and real estate agents projected.

While our first years in Sebring were relatively uneventful, with the exception of a few tiffs with our neighbors, 2002 was a disturbing eye opener. We experienced first-hand the kind of “law and order” my Black friend described. Our experience was such a violation of justice, such a twisting of the law, that our lives were irreversibly changed.

We were living an idyllic life in the countryside raising children when I put two of our sons on Bus 153 on Sept. 3, 2002.  Jesse and Bobbie Jr. were headed down the road to one of their first days in sixth and eighth grades when Bobbie spat out the bus window because of his allergies. The phlegm boomeranged, flew back inside the bus, and hit a well-known town bully nine seats behind him.

According to several witnesses, Clem [names have been changed to protect the identities of parties involved] stood up and exploded in rage. He demanded an answer for why Bobbie spat on him. “I didn’t mean it,” replied Bobbie, according to witness accounts on record with the Sebring Police Department.

In his own words during a deposition that took place six years later in 2008, Clem provided this account:

I was sitting in my seat. I felt the spit hit my face. Somebody said – I was like, “What was that?” Somebody proceeded to tell me that Bobbie spit.

I walked up there, I asked him did he spit, and he goes, “Yes.” He goes, “I didn’t mean to spit on you.”

I said, “You didn’t mean to?”

He goes, “No, I was spitting out the window. I have bad allergies.”

… I said, “So it was an accident?”

He said, “Yes.”

While everyone agrees on these events, the accounts vary with the rest of the story. Clem claims Bobbie began taunting him. But most witnesses on the bus say that Clem exploded in rage, couldn’t control his temper, and threw two very swift sucker punches to the back and side of his head. Clem was one of the strongest eighth graders in the school and a top wrestler – his punches were forceful.

He quickly crouched down in his seat and asked Clem to stop, according to numerous witness accounts on file at the Sebring Police Department. He then grabbed Clem by the wrist with one hand, the throat with the other, and attempted to push him back. A tenth grader, Randy, stood up and grabbed the other wrist and firmly told Clem to “Sit down!”

“What are you doing!” screamed Clem in a rage.

“I’m keeping you from going to prison,” replied Randy.

“I’m not done with you yet,” Clem yelled at Bobbie while taking a seat. “We’ll settle this issue later.” Once the bus reached the middle school, the bus driver and two middle school deans intervened. Despite the fierce blows, no one sent Clem and Bobbie to the principal’s office or nurse’s station.

“I hit him in the shoulder and he choked me,” Clem later wrote in a statement of events. But a half-dozen other accounts given by students on the bus said Bobbie was beaten around the head repeatedly. Bobbie staggered when he got off the bus and was experiencing vision problems, according to his brother Jesse.

The boys were sent off to their classes, the first of which was Physical Education. As Bobbie walked into school, a group of kids began chanting “Finish him off, finish him off!”

Around 9 a.m., Clem and two of his friends trapped Bobbie in the locker room, and the brutality began again. After the gym class, about 30 students were milling around the locker room. Some were talking about the earlier fight on the bus. From the other side of a row of lockers, Clem listened to the conversations and overheard Bobbie tell another student that he thought he could beat him in a fight, according to the deposition.

“Why did you say you can beat my ass?” Clem asked Bobbie in the locker room, according to one witness who saw the entire fight. “Let’s go right now! You won’t tell?”

“No, I won’t,” Bobbie replied, as Clem removed his watch and shirt. “All you gotta do if you wanna go is touch me, touch me,” Clem taunted.

“I don’t wanna start a fight,” Bobbie replied. Clem then pushed Bobbie, according to the witness, and Bobbie pushed back. Clem hit Bobbie twice. When Bobbie fell to the ground, Clem started choking him.

“Who’s choking you now, b–ch!” he cried. There were no adults in the locker room at the time.

“I give up, I give up,” Bobbie cried. By then it was apparent to everyone that Bobbie wasn’t doing very well and would need some medical help.

But Clem continued with his taunts as he immobilized Bobbie with a full nelson wrestling hold, according to one witness. “Don’t f— with me again” he yelled. ”None of this happened, okay? You hit your head on the lockers, and then I walked out of the room.”

And that’s when the long walk to the nursing station began with Clem by his side. “You need to tell them that you fell and struck your head on the bench,” Clem instructed Bobbie, according to an affidavit taken by arresting officer L. Milbrecht on Sept. 24, 2002. He continued to bully and badger Bobbie. In a final attempt at intimidation, Clem struck Bobbie in the back of the head as they walked the full length of a football field to the nurse’s station. In the 2008 deposition, Clem claims that Bobbie told him he “felt a little funny.”

When they arrived at the nurse’s office, both boys told Pat LeFiles that Bobbie fell in the locker room and hit his head on a bench. He was so traumatized, so fearful that Clem would come after him again, that he lied repeatedly to the nurse about the incident.

In an account taken by the same arresting officer on Sept. 9, 2002, most of the 10 student witnesses shared similar accounts of what happened on the bus and in the locker room. But Bobbie was the only person who could testify about the third and final blow on the way to the nurse’s station. According to those witness accounts, Bobbie sustained 4 to 5 blows on the bus, another 3 to 4 in the locker room, and a final punch to the head on the way to the nurse’s station for a total of about 10 hits by one of the largest and strongest boys in the eighth grade class. Clem was on the fast track to becoming a top wrestler on the school team and received state recognition in his junior and senior years. He was an all-around athlete who also had taken boxing and Tae Kwon Do.

After the nurse gave Bobbie an ice pack for his head and called his mother, he was sent to his next class. He was woozy and became increasingly despondent and incoherent and asked his teacher to escort him back to the nurse’s station. It was then that he finally told Ms. LeFiles the truth about what happened in the locker room. Additional school personnel were brought in, and Bobbie was further interviewed about what happened.

Around this time, Marilyn arrived at the school. She was never instructed to take Bobbie to the hospital, nor was an ambulance ever considered by school administration. He was carried out to Marilyn’s car by two deans. His brain was swelling from the repeated blows over a 2 ½-hour period of time, and on the ride home, he vomited and began to lose consciousness.

By the time Marilyn pulled into the driveway, Bobbie’s eyes were sunk backward and totally white. As a longtime sports enthusiast and professional weight lifter, I knew what that meant. I took my knuckles and rolled them into Bobbie’s sternum to evoke a response. There was none. He threw up again and slumped back into the car seat. I knew at that point that if we didn’t get Bobbie to an emergency room fast, he could be in very serious trouble.

I bumped Marilyn out of the car and grabbed the wheel. The hospital was 10 minutes away, but it was the longest, most excruciating drive of my life. When we arrived at Highlands Regional Medical Center, I gathered Bobbie’s listless body into my arms, kicked in the swinging hospital door, and screamed for help. The nurse came over and checked his pupil response with her pocket flashlight.

“He’s been like this for hours! What took you so long?” she cried.

“As fast as I found out was as fast as I could get here,” I explained, not realizing at the time that Bobbie had been in danger since the first time he’d been hit on the bus in what turned out to be a 2 1/2-hour melee. The swelling continued to increase with each blow from the perpetrator.

“Where did this happen?” she asked. When I told her Sebring Middle School, she replied with a sigh, “Not another one.”

As they rushed Bobbie into an emergency room and pumped him back to life, for the next 22 minutes I wondered if I might have to tell Marilyn that our first-born son had been killed. Sweat poured down my cheeks, my hands shook with grief and fear. During the entire time in the emergency room, I never left his side.

A neurological exam when he first arrived described him as unresponsive and combative.  He vomited three times as he faded in and out of consciousness. As his condition stabilized, the local hospital staff performed an MRI brain scan. They found swelling near the temporal region. “Subgaleal hematoma present in the parietal temporal lobe region,” was the radiology department findings.

The doctor said his brain had bounced around like a basketball inside his skull. He’d been hit so many times his brain actually banged against the other side of the inside of his skull.

At 11:25 that morning, a nursing assessment found him unresponsive with sluggish pupils. While he responded to sternal rubs, he couldn’t speak. The staff determined that his injuries were beyond their professional capabilities and prepared a helicopter for a flight lift to the Intensive Care Unit at Tampa General Hospital.

As we waited for the helicopter, Officer Milbrecht from the Sebring Police Department arrived to take a statement from Bobbie. She asked if I wanted to press charges.

“This boy could die,” the nurse intervened. Milbrecht gave her a stern look and then looked at me.

“Yeah,” I agreed in a soft voice so as not to distress Bobbie.

I asked Officer Milbrecht who the perpetrator was. She replied that it was Clem. “I’m not surprised,” she added with a roll of her eyes as she walked away.

As they loaded Bobbie into the helicopter, the Assistant Principal of the Middle School, Stu Guthrie, approached me with his business card and asked how Bobbie was doing. “One of the boys in the locker room said that Bobbie looked like he was going into a coma,” he divulged anxiously.

I took his business card and just walked away in shock. As the helicopter rose into the air, Marilyn and Jessie were preparing for the drive to Tampa to be by Bobbie’s side while he recovered in intensive care for two days. I stayed home to care for our baby and toddler.

At this point, the locker room incident was the only one Marilyn and I had been told about. It wasn’t until after we returned from Tampa that we learned from Jessie about the beating on the bus and from Bobbie about the disturbing walk to the clinic.

Meanwhile, back at the Highlands County Middle School, on the day of the incident, Clem was paraded across the school yard and into a police car in handcuffs. Around the same time, the Highlands County Sheriff’s Department and School Board began a well-orchestrated cover up. The first to marginalize the incident was Sebring’s very own Middle School Principal Sandra Whidden.

“Boys will be boys” she told us when we first began asking questions about what really happened during those 2 ½ hours of hell our son endured with not one whit of adult intervention.

Copyright 2010 –  Bobbie Bean Campaign for the US Senate