ME ME - Philip 'Phil' Williams, 15, Poland, 27 Dec 1982

Maine state police are looking into a claim that a boxing match used as punishment at a now-closed school for troubled teens preceded a student's death from a brain injury three decades ago.

Authorities told Pam Newell in 1982 her brother, Phil Williams Jr., died from a brain aneurysm. She said she only learned two weeks ago that he had been forced into the infamous boxing ring at the Elan School the day before he died...

Forced fighting was among several controversial therapies employed by the school, which closed in 2011. The practice emerged during Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel's 2002 murder trial in Connecticut.

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Newall was contacted by a former student working on a documentary who had names and phone numbers of witnesses. They told her Williams was accused by staff of faking headaches.

They said in the hours before her brother’s death, he had been punished in what they described as a boxing ring.

“Not a boxing ring, like a boxing ring. A ring of children where he proceeded to get beat,” Newall said. “Twenty minutes or so they called the ambulance. They took Phil and they never saw him again.”

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Friends and family members with HAAD Enough Inc., a year-old group representing unsolved missing and murder cases in Maine, held a news conference to announce proposed victims’ bill of rights legislation and to question the progress of the state’s new cold-case unit. They say they are frustrated that not enough has been done since the Legislature created the unit in 2015.

Mark Babitz of Chicago, who has been active in bringing attention to the death of Phil Williams Jr., an Auburn teenager who died in 1982 a day after witnesses say he was forced into the boxing ring at the infamous Elan School, said he’d joined HAAD Enough to share his experience in shaking things up...

After Williams died in 1982, Hoffman said no students were interviewed, and no adults stepped forward.

“No one did the right thing,” he said.

Elan operated as a private boarding school from 1970 to 2011. Its controversial tactics are featured in an upcoming documentary, “The Last Stop,” by New York filmmaker Todd Nilssen, who is planning its premiere for April in Maine.

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