On January 10, 2013, the family of 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson reported their son missing. He had missed much of the previous school day and failed to come home after that.
The following day, January 11, 2013, there appeared to be no trace of Kendrick Johnson in the school where he had last been seen.
That was until one of his classmates saw a pair of socked feet sticking out from a rolled-up wrestling mat. Inside the mat was Kendrick, no longer alive. He had been there the entire time.
What would follow this grisly discovery was a tragic, mysterious, and sometimes shocking investigation into the death of Kendrick Johnson.
His family would stop at nothing to find justice for their son.
But was there actually any justice to be found for Kendrick’s death, or was he just the victim of a terrible accident?
In this article, we’ll delve into the chilling details of Kendrick Johnson’s death and the legal battles that followed.
Who Was Kendrick Johnson?
Kendrick Lamar Johnson, called K.J. by friends and family, was born on October 10, 1995, to parents Kenneth Johnson and Jaquelyn Johnson.
He was known to enjoy school, was popular with his peers, and had a powerful passion for sports.
Kendrick was involved in multiple sports at the high school he attended, Lowndes High School in Valdosta Georgia. He played on the football, basketball, and track teams and was a valued teammate.
Like many students at Lowndes High School, Kendrick had his own habits throughout the school day. Kendrick, along with other athletes at the school, would often store their belongings in odd places to avoid paying the locker fees.
One of the most common hiding places, especially for gym shoes, was the rolled-up wrestling mats stored in one of the two gymnasiums.
This gym, called the “old gym”, held several of these mats, some of them stored lying down and others stored standing upright.
Kendrick shared a pair of Adidas shoes with another student, and they would store these shoes in one of these standing mats between uses. It was this odd practice that would lead to tragedy in early 2013.
The Discovery Of Kendrick Johnson’s Body
On the day of Kendrick’s disappearance, he was recorded on one of the school’s security cameras walking into the old gym, presumably to either retrieve or store the shared pair of shoes.
The students had only recently returned from the holiday break, during which a number of extra mats were added to the number already stored in the old gym. This meant that the mat Kendrick stored his shoes inside of was further back than usual.
He entered the gym alone but never exited.
The following day, after Kendrick had been reported missing to both the police and the school, no one had yet pinpointed Kendrick’s last known location.
There was a small group of students in the old gym on the morning of January 11, filling out some papers and sitting on the mats that were on their side.
From there, one student spotted a pair of feet, wearing just socks, sticking out from one of the mats that were standing up.
Another student climbed up and, to his shock, saw Kendrick Johnson stuck inside the wrestling mat. He tried to pull him out but failed, and the students called 911.
In the meantime, a teacher arrived to help the students lay the mat containing Kerdrick on its side and tried to extract him. It quickly became apparent, due to the presence of blood and the smell of decomposition, that Kendrick was deceased.
The students were sent away by the teacher, the school put on lockdown, and an immediate investigation began.
Was Kendrick Johnson’s Death An Accident?
It was quickly determined that Kendrick Johnson had been dead for almost 24 hours and that he had died within the wrestling mat.
According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), Kendrick Johnson died from positional asphyxia after being stuck upside down for so long. There was a multitude of evidence supporting this claim, including:
● Kendrick was in a head-down position in the mat, where it is believed he was reaching for the shared pair of Adidas.
● The shoes he was trying to reach beneath him at the bottom of the mat.
● The only blood on the scene being purge fluid from Kendrick.
● The shoes Kendrick had been wearing were kicked off and resting near his feet, insinuating that he had kicked them off during his struggle to escape the mat.
Kendrick Johnson’s death being an accident is also supported by the surveillance footage, which shows Kendrick entering the gym but never exiting.
With all of this evidence and the results of the autopsy performed by the GBI, it was determined that Kendrick Johnson’s death was simply a terrible accident. No foul play was involved.
Despite this determination, Kendrick’s family wasn’t convinced, and they began to seek out their own answers.
Kendrick Johnson’s Family Fights For The Truth
With how quickly it was determined that Kendrick Johnson died accidentally, it wasn’t a surprise that his family still had questions.
Disturbingly, the deeper the family looked into their son’s death, the more strange discrepancies they found.
The question is–were the things Kendrick’s family discovered enough to prove his death wasn’t an accident, or were they just coincidences?
Theories About The Death Of Kendrick Johnson
Unsatisfied with the results of the GBI autopsy, Kendrick’s family sought a second autopsy performed by a private pathologist.
This pathologist, Dr. Bill Anderson, made a shocking discovery as soon as the autopsy began. Instead of Kendrick’s internal organs, his body was stuffed with newspaper. The organs were missing.
Even his brain was gone, replaced with more newspapers. Kendrick’s family was disturbed and shaken by this news, but it wasn’t as sinister as it appeared.
The organs were removed during the initial autopsy by the GBI and placed into a bag, which was put into the body before it was released to the funeral home.
The organs were then disposed of by the funeral home, and the body was stuffed with newspaper to hold its shape.
This practice, while not illegal or unheard of, was an older practice that had fallen out of favor years ago. Most bodies were instead studded with cotton or sawdust.
To the Johnson family, though, this strange finding only further convinced them that something was being covered up.
Once the second autopsy was complete, the findings were vastly different from those of the initial autopsy. Dr. Anderson determined that blunt force trauma was present on Kendrick’s neck.
Anderson told CNN, “This is unexplained, most very, very likely inflicted, as opposed to something he caused himself, inflicted by another, and therefore needs to be investigated as an open homicide investigation,”
The next big discrepancy were apparent chunks of missing time in the surveillance footage from around the school. There is a ten minute section of time between two stills of Kendrick, first outside the old gym door and next inside of it, that is unaccounted for.
Ten minutes is plenty of time for something like an attack to occur, but with further investigation, it was determined that the missing time was due to the school’s two surveillance camera servers not being synced up.
So even though the time stamps on the images seem to indicate missing time, it was simply due to one of the camera servers not being set to the correct time.
Legal Battles
After the private autopsy was complete, the Johnson family believed that there was more to Kendrick’s death than the GBI wanted to admit.
A formal review of the case was opened by United States Attorney Michael Moore, and the Johnson family filed to have a coroner’s inquest opened regarding Kendrick’s death.
They would also file a wrongful death lawsuit against the Lowndes County Board of Education, the superintendent, and the principal of the high school.
They cited the findings of the second autopsy and the fact that Kendrick had been in a fight on the bus months before his death as reasons for the lawsuit.
There was also mention of a set of brothers (one of whom was involved in the aforementioned fight) that the family thought might have been involved in the death of Kendrick Johnson.
These boys were the sons of an FBI agent but weren’t mentioned by name initially.
Despite not using names, the physical description of the boys, along with their father’s job being revealed, made it easy for the public to identify them.
As a result, the boys were harassed, and one lost a football scholarship, even though both had solid alibis during the day of Kendrick’s death.
In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice took notice and opened a federal investigation into Kendrick Johnson’s death. Nothing came out of this investigation, and it was closed in 2016 with no charges being filed.
The case was reopened a second time in March of 2021 by Lowndes County Sheriff Ashley Paulk, but after an intensive investigation, Paulk would close the case in 2022.
During these numerous investigations, nothing was ever found to indicate homicide. Kendrick Johnson’s death remains officially an accident.
Unsatisfied, the Johnson family continues to fight, still believing that there is more to Kendrick’s death.
Sources
https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/09/us/georgia-gym-mat-death/index.html
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdga/pr/justice-department-closes-investigation-death-kendrick-johnson
Leave a comment