Kendrick Johnson was born on the 10th of October 1995 and lived with his family in Valdosta, Georgia, US. Kendrick attended Lowndes High School and was an athlete with ambitions of being a professional footballer. Tragically, on the 11th of January 2013, these dreams were cut short when the body of 17-year-old Kendrick was found.
High school students discovered Kendrick in the gymnasium; his body was upside down in a rolled-up, vertical gym mat. They unrolled the mat and found his body with one arm extended over his head and the other by his waist. When he was found, Kendrick wasn’t wearing shoes, just socks. Students told authorities that they would often leave their trainers in the rolled gym mats to save paying out for a locker. The position of Kendrick's body and the shoe at the bottom of the mat made it (at first glance) look like Kendrick had done this before getting stuck retrieving his footwear.
However, it appeared that the situation was stranger than first thought.
After Kendrick had died, it took nearly 24 hours before his body was discovered. It seems strange that it took that long in a school of over 3,000 students – did no one miss him? Did he not shout for help? We should also consider that, after the time Kendrick had spent upside down, the blood would have rushed to his face and caused bleeding from his facial orifices. The shoe that was directly underneath him, that he was supposedly reaching for, was in a pool of blood, but there was none on top of it. If blood were dripping down, would you not have expected at least some to have marked the top of the shoe?
The size of the mat was also questioned. Once rolled, it had a diameter of 14 inches, but Kendrick’s shoulders were 19 inches across. He may have managed to squeeze himself in, but something didn’t seem quite right.
Nearby to where Kendrick was found, a pair of gym shoes and a hoodie were discovered, along with traces of blood on the wall. The blood didn’t belong to Kendrick, and investigators did not think the shoes and hoodie to be important and didn’t consider them for evidence.
Kendrick’s body was taken in, and an autopsy was conducted. The official cause of death was positional asphyxia, and just 24 hours after he had been found, the Sheriff’s Department ruled Kendrick Johnson's death an accident.
Unsurprisingly, Kendrick's parents, Kenneth and Jacquelyn Johnson, were unsatisfied with this outcome.
Both parents believed something more sinister had happened and were determined to prove it. They thought Kendricks's body had been moved after he died, but before he was discovered, and Lowndes County Coroner Bill Watson agreed with them. Watson also claimed that he wasn’t notified about the body until six hours after it had been discovered; Georgia law states that a coroner should be contacted as soon as a body is found.
In an act of desperation, the Johnsons released a photo of their son lying in the funeral home. The public was horrified by the sight of the teenager's swollen face and soon began rallying around the family.
On the 8th of May 2013, a judge gave the Johnsons permission to exhume the body, and a private pathologist was hired to carry out another autopsy. The pathologist discovered haemorrhaging on the right side of Kendricks's neck, indicating damage before death. He concluded the death was not accidental but had been caused by blunt force trauma.
Kendricks's body was also missing various organs, despite the Georgia Bureau of Investigations claiming that they had been placed back in after the first autopsy. The coroner told the family that the organs had been too decomposed and had been replaced with newspaper. As a result, the organs couldn’t be investigated by the private pathologist.
The Johnsons were hoping for a coroner's inquest into the death as a result of the new evidence, but this was denied.
News channel CNN managed to get hold of the school's security footage from the day of Kendrick’s death, but not a lot could be seen. The cameras facing the gym mats hadn’t produced a high-quality video, and the others showed Kendrick walking towards the gym area but not leaving. Interestingly, an hour of footage was missing – the hour that would have shown precisely what had happened to Kendrick.
In 2014, the Johnsons filed a wrongful death suit against the school officials. Reports had been revealed that Kendrick had been bullied by a white student, quite possibly due to his skin colour (racism was still rampant at this time in Valdosta), but the school had never done anything to address the issue.
Rumours had started to circulate that Kendrick had been murdered by two white brothers, Brian and Brandon Bell. Later, in a petition put forward by the Johnsons, witnesses collaborated these rumours. Part of the petition said, ‘Brian Bell has also stated that he killed Kendrick Johnson multiple times over the phone. Brandon Bell, who is both a student at Valdosta High School and the brother of Brian Bell, had got drunk at a party on July 4, 2013, and told people that Brian Bell killed Kendrick Johnson.’
In the same petition, Ryan Anthony Domek-Hernadez said Brian Bell had told him he ‘killed Kendrick Johnson by striking his neck with a 45-pound weight/dumbbell after they began arguing over Taylor Eakin’. Taylor was a girl that Bell liked romantically, but she was apparently interested in Kendrick.
According to Brandon, his brother Brian told Ryan that if he did not keep quiet and help him move Kendrick's body after his death, his father would make him pay for it. Brian Bell's father was retired FBI agent Rick Bell, leading to speculation of a cover-up; had authorities connected by the ‘old boys network’ hidden what had actually happened?
In June 2016, the Department of Justice announced that no charges would be filed, saying there was ‘insufficient evidence to support federal charges’.
2 Years later, Kendricks's body was exhumed for a third autopsy. This autopsy also showed evidence of blunt force trauma, likely due to being ‘struck in the neck with a 45lb dumbbell’.
In March 2022, the case was reopened. The Lowndes County Sheriff of that time, Ashley Paull, said, ‘If there’s questions- and they’re legitimate – I need to know the answers myself. The only way I’m going to know is to look at the evidence myself.’
Sadly, this case, too, was closed with no charges filed, with Paulk saying it was a ‘weird accident, there is nothing to substantiate a homicide. Nothing criminal happened.’
The Johnsons lawyer Jonathan Burrs said, ‘All the evidence they collected contradicts the cause of death on the certificate as well as the synopsis.’
Jacquelyn Johnson has since said, ‘Nobody really cares. Nobody wants Kendrick to get justice. It's just like shut this family up, sending them on their way, but what they didn’t realise is the Johnson family is not going anywhere.’
Kenneth Johnson said about the town, ‘We live there. We know how this town is. We know how they will lie. We know how they will cover up for one another.’
There is so much more I could write about this case: the denials, the inconsistencies, the theories. It could well be that Kendrick's death was an awful tragedy, a momentary lapse of judgment that cost him his life. But it could also be a case of unsolved murder, a cover-up, with those involved closing ranks (although we must remember that Brian Bell was never charged due to insufficient evidence). Either way, it’s a sad loss of a 17-year-old with his whole life ahead of him.
If anyone wants to see the more extreme photos, I will put them at the end of this page, but be warned, they’re not pleasant. Thanks for reading; take care of yourselves, and I will see you next time.
‘We are going to continue fighting for Kendrick because his life mattered.’
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SCROLL DOWN FOR PHOTOS OF KENDRICK AFTER HIS DEATH
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