PHILADELPHIA – A casket exhumed as part of an investigation into an infamous Florida reform school shuttered in 2011 is leading authorities to “more questions than answers.”

University of South Florida anthropologists are unearthing the remains of dozens of former students at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, where more than 100 young boys died for a variety of reasons while at the juvenile detention facility between 1900 and 1952.

The effort is part of an investigation into the sordid history of the juvenile detention facility, and the mysterious deaths of its teen residents. It’s also an attempt to bring closure to families who lost loved ones at the school, Fox 59 reports.

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The remains of many of those who died at the school were shipped to their families, and about half were buried on school grounds. But new evidence suggests the school, which closed in 2011 for budget issues, may have been deceiving the public and the families of its students for decades.

Anthropologist Erin Kimmerle and her crew this week in Philadelphia exhumed the casket of Thomas Curry, which was shipped home from the school to his family after the 17-year-old allegedly died “under suspicious circumstances while escaping Dozier twenty-nine days after arriving” in 1925, according to a court order cited by the news site.

What they found was shocking.

“Wood. Layers of pieces of wood,” Kimmerle told Fox of the findings. “It was completely filled with wooden planks.”

Curry’s death certificate was found by authorities at the school after the state launched an investigation in 2008. The document said the young man died of a crushed skull from an “unknown cause,” the news site reports.

A corner’s entry did not list a cause of death and stated only that he was “killed on RR Bridge Chattahoochee, Fla.”

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The exhumation “was a little bit of a shock. It was certainly anticlimatic,” Pennsylvania State Police Cpl. Tom McAndrew told the news site. “Something was shipped up from Florida, and it was buried, and someone believed it was Thomas Curry.”

McAndrew said he believes the discovery was “absolutely” evidence that school officials attempted to deceive the family, which isn’t particularly surprising considering Dozier’s “decades and decades of efforts to deceive, cover-ups, and not just by one but many people,” Fox reports.

Distant relatives of the deceased Curry provided investigators with their family history and DNA samples to identify their lost relative, which officials plan to use to compare with dozens of bodies that have already been exhumed from the 1,400 acre Dozier facility about 62 miles west of Tallahassee, according to the news site.

“Their interest lies in justice being served,” McAndrews said of Curry’s family.

Kimmerle told Fox “we went into it trying to answer questions,” but “what we have is more questions than answers.”

Kimmerle’s team found 55 bodies at the former Dozier school site to date, as well as records for 22 other students who died there but are unaccounted for. The victims allegedly died from a dorm fire, the flu, pneumonia and other causes, Fox reports.

A state investigation into abuse at the school in 2008 and 2009 was inconclusive, but a support group of former students, many of which are now elderly, called the White House Boys tells a different story.

“A support group for ex-students, dubbed The White House Boys, takes its moniker from the structure where (members) say they were beaten with a leather strap attached to a wooden handle,” Fox reports.

“They were whipped until their underwear was embedded in their buttocks, The White House Boys say. Some were beaten unconscious. Crying or screaming out would earn you extra lashes, they say.”