Kendrick Johnson was born on October 10, 1995. The teenager lived with his family in Valdosta, Georgia, USA. Johnson was referred to by his relatives as a nice and calm boy. The sport was his great passion. The boy practiced several sports and in the future, he dreamed of a football career. Unfortunately, he was unable to implement this plan.
On January 11, 2013, Kendrick's body was discovered at Lowndes High School, which he attended. The students found the body, looking down at the exercise mats in the gym. Each of them was almost 180 cm high and 90 cm wide. The content of one of them caught the attention of high school students. Later it turned out that inside was the body of their school friend.
An autopsy conducted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) revealed that Johnson died of positional asphyxia. Put simply, the teenager suffocated as a result of being in a non-breathing position for a long time.
Students admitted that some of them kept shoes and other things inside rolled-up mats so as not to pay for the school locker. Johnson also found that he made frequent use of this method. In addition, when he was found, he was only wearing socks. Investigators, therefore, concluded that the 17-year-old probably fell inside the mat while searching for shoes, got stuck, and died unable to get out. When the mat was unfolded, it turned out that one hand was extended above his head. The other, on the other hand, was parallel to the torso. It actually looked as if he was trying to reach for his shoes.
The investigation was therefore quickly completed (within less than 24 hours from its start). Kendrick's death was considered an unfortunate accident. Lt. Stryde Jones, who led the investigation at the Lowndes County Sheriff's Office, concluded that there was no plausible indication that a third party might have been involved in the case.
Johnson's family, however, questioned this position. Relatives believed that Kendrick's death was not taken seriously on racial grounds. The teenager was black and all the investigators were white. In Georgia in 2013, racism was quite common (I suspect that little has changed over the past few years). The family's attorney, Chevene King, stated that if the deceased were white, the investigation would have been different. Prejudice is one thing, but the evident mistakes or omissions of officers are another issue.
According to the Johnson family, the boy's body was transferred after his death, as confirmed by Lowndes County Coroner Bill Watson. It is also worth adding that Georgia state law requires that the person declaring the death be notified immediately after the discovery of the body. Watson admitted, however, that he did not receive such information until six hours later. The parents of the deceased also drew attention to one more issue. If it was indeed an accident, why did no one hear their son scream for help in a school with more than 3,000 students?
Another riddle was also puzzling. The black and white Adidas lying on the ground beneath Kendrick, which he was supposed to be reaching for, was lying in a pool of blood, but there was no trace of it on the shoe itself. A hooded sweatshirt and a pair of orange and black sneakers were also found on the gym floor. Blood stains were also visible on a nearby wall.
Blood tests showed that it did not belong to Kendrick Johnson. Investigators said the blood was likely to have been there for a long time. Oddly enough, the police did not classify the aforementioned sweatshirt and shoes as evidence in the case. In this way, the possibility of obtaining potentially relevant information was lost.
One more puzzling detail should also be mentioned. After unrolling the body mat, a pair of sports shoes were found near the boy's knees. Where did the second pair come from and why did they end up in this place?
The 17-year-old's desperate parents sent the media a photo of their son while his body was in the funeral home. The photo of Kendrick's extremely swollen face looked macabre (that's why I decided not to include it on the website, but it is available on the Internet). The public was horrified by this picture and began to support the Johnsons in their fight to find out the truth. On May 8, 2013, the judge agreed to exhume the teenager's body.
Relatives, dissatisfied with the outcome of the investigation, commissioned an independent post-mortem examination. On June 15, 2013, about 5 months after the boy's death, it was conducted by William R. Anderson of Forensic Dimensions in Heathrow, Florida. The man stated that he had found blunt force marks on the right side of the neck and torso. This suggested that the death was not the result of the accident, but the interference of other people.
However, this is not the end of the strange cases in this case. An independent post-mortem examination revealed that Johnson's body was stuffed with newspapers before the funeral. Funeral home workers admitted that this is a common practice, sometimes also using cotton or sawdust. In this situation, this action resulted from the fact that the bodies that came to them after the performed autopsy had no internal organs. Interestingly, the GBI agency claimed to have donated the body with all its organs. However, the coroner argued otherwise, who said that the internal organs were so decayed that they had been removed.
The Johnsons sued the funeral home for mishandling their son's body. They alleged that this was done to hide the true cause of his death. However, the lawsuit was dismissed. In any event, the organs were lost and could not be examined at the second postmortem.
As a result of this new evidence, prosecutor Michael J. Moore announced on October 31, 2013, a formal search on the death of the deceased teenager. The Johnson family hoped for an investigation by the coroner, which would start the process of reclassifying their son's accidental death and reopening the investigation. The request was denied, however, even though Coroner Bill Watson initially expressed his distrust of the Sheriff's Department's handling of the case.
The American television station CNN managed to gain access to the school monitoring recordings of the day Kendrick Johnson died. After verification, however, it turned out that on their basis it is not possible to state unequivocally what happened then.
The image from the camera facing the mats was blurry. The device also did not focus on tracking this key point, but "jumped" from one place to another. Video surveillance recorded Kendrick walking towards the gymnasium. There is also a few seconds of video where you can see the boy exercising. However, there is no movie that shows a teenager entering or leaving a room. It is known, however, that Johnson did not show up for the next class.
The most puzzling thing, however, is that the monitoring recording was not complete. There was no one hour of footage of what was happening in the gym when the 17-year-old probably died. This discovery made many even more convinced that the boy's death was not an accident.
A controversial article about the case has been published on Ebony.com. There was a theory in it that two brothers were responsible for Johnson's death. The motive was to be a conflict between the students. It led to a fight between the brothers and Johnson over a year earlier.
Although the names of the alleged perpetrators were not given, their descriptions could point to Brian and Brandon Bell. The family of the deceased teenager also accused the brothers' father, then an FBI agent, of covering up the murder. In their opinion, the man had manipulated the school authorities and the investigating officers.
In 2015, the Johnson family filed a civil lawsuit against 38 individuals and institutions. This group included their son's classmates, state and federal officials, GBI and FBI agents, and a crime school and lab. The parents claimed that the sons of an FBI agent, mentioned earlier, had killed Johnson and used their connections to hide evidence of the crime. Kendrick's relatives demanded $ 100 million in damages.
The Johnsons, however, had no hard evidence to back up any of these accusations and had to drop their lawsuit. Instead, they were sued for more than $850,000 in attorney fees and more than $1 million for defamation. Ultimately, the judge ordered Kendrick's parents to pay nearly $300,000 in fees to lawyers representing the wrongly accused.
In June 2016, the Department of Justice announced that no charges would be brought against the death of Kendrick Johnson, given that "there is insufficient evidence to support federal criminal charges." So the case was officially closed. The boy's parents, however, did not give up.
In June 2018, Kendrick's body was exhumed a second time and a third postmortem examination was performed. Findings from the second autopsy that Johnson's death was not a result of the accident have been confirmed. It was concluded that the cause of death may have been a blow to the neck with a blunt object, possibly a dumbbell weighing 20 kilograms.
Kendrick Johnson's parents hoped that the results of this third autopsy would be enough to reopen their son's case. In fact, it happened in March 2021. At the moment, the investigation is still ongoing. They are run by 76-year-old Sheriff Ashley Paulk of Lowndes. The man was retired, but Johnson's case haunted him. The investigator, therefore, decided to return to the old position and read the case files. I hope that the answer to the question of whether the teenager died as a result of the accident or was the victim of a crime will eventually be found.
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