The Bizarre Death of Kendrick Johnson
- Paige Phillips
- Jan 11, 2019
- 6 min read
*Includes sensitive and graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised*
Kendrick Johnson was a student at the Lownes High School in Valdosta, when on January 11th2013 his body was found inside a rolled up, gymnasium mat. An investigation found the cause of death as an accident, but a second autopsy was carried out by a private pathologist hired by Johnson’s family, and concluded his death was due to blunt force trauma.
Johnson was 17 years old at the time. Investigators concluded that the teen had become trapped inside the mat after he looked inside for his sneakers. A medical coroner concluded that he fell at an angle that caused positional asphyxia.
Video of the crime scene. *Graphic* please watch with care.
Johnson was last seen on Thursday 10th January after 4th period walking towards the gym. He is seen on surveillance footage at 1:09pm entering the lesser used of the two school gyms. His father Kenneth reported his son missing to Lowndes County police later that night, when Johnson failed to return home.
Johnson was found headfirst in the centre of a rolled-up wrestling mat, discovered by students who had climbed up to the top of the cluster of mats and saw a pair of socks hanging out of one. Each mat stood nearly six feet tall and three feet wide. According to students at the school, it was common for some students to store their shoes behind or under the rolled-up mats. A student at the school said that he shared a pair of adidas shoes with Johnson, and that after their gym class had finished, Johnson would tell him to “go to the mats, jump up and toss the shoes inside the middle of the hole”. When Johnson was found inside the mat, he was not wearing shoes.
The crime scene was incredibly mishandled. The county coroner, Bill Watson, was not called to the scene until later that evening, after Johnson’s body had been sitting and decomposing for hours without being examined. The crime scene itself was not being processed correctly, with people on scene not wearing foot coverings and not all evidence was being bagged or even considered.
Watson described how Johnson’s body was in the back corner of the old gym, hanging halfway out of a rolled-up wrestling mat. His body was covered in blood and vomit, his face swollen and he had been dead for over 24hrs. Despite the sheriff that evening making a statement saying “foul play is not suspected”, Watson recalled the scene and said how he “definitely would not have ruled it as an accident”.
There were blood drips found on the wall of the gym near the mats, but police say the drips were too old to have been relative to the case. A shoe was also found nearby which blood on it, but it actually turned out to be just paint. Kendrick’s own shoes also posed an issue. Over the course of the day that it took for Johnson’s body to be found, blood and other fluids had leaked from his body and onto the floor beneath him. Yet his shoes remained pristine, sitting in the pool as if they had been placed there.
Kenneth Johnson became concerned about the preservation of his son’s body, claiming the refrigerated unit at the Valdosta Crime Lab were his body was being kept for positive identification was actually releasing warm air instead of cold. As Kendrick’s body was being transported for autopsy, his clothes and other belongings had gone missing.
The family paid for a second autopsy to take place in 2013, as some of Johnson’s internal organs were reported to have gone missing. It was reported that after the initial autopsy, the teens body was stuffed with newspaper instead of his organs. The initial autopsy report also failed to include bruising to Johnson’s chin that responding paramedics put in their initial report. The second autopsy revealed Johnson’s body had blunt force trauma to the right side of the neck, near the jaw and that the manner of the death was not an accident.
Haemorrhages were also found to the jawline area not detected in the original autopsy. It was concluded he had died of a heart attack brought on by the blunt force trauma to his carotid artery. A further third autopsy was conducted which supported the results from the second autopsy, claiming there was blunt force trauma to high right neck and upper right chest, and that the cause of death was “non-accidental”.
The gym area was monitored by CCTV coverage and a forensic analyst was hired to watch the footage. It became clear that tapes from two cameras are missing an hour of 5 minutes of footage, whilst another set was missing two hours and ten minutes of footage. The gaps in footage occur between 11-1.30pm on January 10th. The area where Johnson’s body was discovered was outside the rang of all the surveillance cameras. The Valdosta-Lowndes County police department explained that the missing footage was due to the cameras being inactive as they were motion activated. However, several students were entering the gym in that time and therefore should have set off the motion cameras. The cameras were also not synchronised with each other, providing differences in 20 minutes for the same time period, meaning there was a ‘gap’ present, when there was actually no difference in time.
It is alleged that Johnson was attacked on a bus-trip 14 months prior to his death, and that another student had a history of provoking and attacking Johnson at school in the presence of coaching staff and employees. Kendrick’s mother claims the school did not properly monitor the activities of the students or stop the attacks from taking place.
Two classmates of Johnson, Brian and Brandon Bell have been accused of being suspects in Johnson’s death. It is alleged that the younger of the two brothers killed Johnson after learning that he had sex with the brother’s girlfriend. Their father, Rick Bell, was an FBI agent at the time, and barred both of his sons from talking. He became concerned that the incident on the bus between Brian and Kendrick could implicate his son in his death. Both teachers and students confirmed that Brian was in a class on the other side of the school at the time Kendrick was entering the gym, and Brandon was on a bus trip to Macon for a wrestling meet, therefore both had alibis at the time of Johnson’s death.
My thoughts:
Whether this case was an accident or a murder, one thing that can be concluded for certain is that the police department did a terrible job of handling this case, and so many mistakes were made it would make it almost impossible to prove it was a murder. My own gut instinct leads me to believe that this was not an accident, and was indeed a murder. It seems almost impossible to squeeze into a mat, and the amount of trauma Kendrick had on his body could not just occur from the mat. These injuries had to have been sustained before and therefore imply his body was pushed into the mat to cover it up. It seems odd that Kendrick wouldn’t just have moved the mat to get the shoes, or asked someone to help him? Even if he did go in, wouldn’t other students who had entered shortly after have heard him shouting for help? And if he was moving his arms to try and free himself, why was he found grasping onto a pair of headphones so tightly, surely, he would have let go to release them?
There seems to be no good way to end this case and it seems unlikely it will ever get solved. One of the Bell brothers did have his college scholarship revoked though, after the collage received many emails from various people claiming he was a murderer, which seems to be a little bit of justice.
It is sad that the family have set of a number of law-suits to sue the school and police department, and all have been met with counter-arguments or have been dropped entirely. It’s sad to think this family will never find justice or closure for their son.
You can support the family through their Facebook page, Justice for Kendrick, at https://www.facebook.com/JusticeForKJ/
Resources:
Comments