Three years ago, 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson was found dead in a rolled-up gym mat at Lowndes High School outside Valdosta, Georgia. His death was ruled an accident, but enough red flags turned up to prompt federal prosecutors to launch a civil rights investigation into Johnson’s death. On Monday, they announced that they don’t have enough evidence to pursue charges.
Watch more coverage from WMGT-TV in Macon here.
In a statement, the acting U. S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, Carole Rendon said there was “insufficient evidence” that anyone had violated Johnson’s civil rights. Rendon also apologized to Johnson’s family and friends for not being able to find “more definitive answers” about how Johnson died.
I wrote about this tragedy fairly extensively on Daily Kos in 2013 and 2014. Looking back, it looks like prosecutors were hampered by local police work that was grossly incompetent at best. For one thing, EMTs who responded to the scene found evidence of blunt-force trauma. However, this was never mentioned in either the crime lab report or the official autopsy, which found that Johnson fell into one of the mats while trying to find a shoe and landed in a position where he couldn’t breathe.
Smelling a rat, Johnson’s parents, Kenneth and Jacquelyn, paid for Florida pathologist Bill Anderson to conduct an independent autopsy. That review concluded that Kendrick had died of blunt-force trauma to the neck. Even worse, Anderson discovered that several of Johnson’s organs had been removed prior to the funeral, and the cavities stuffed with newspaper. Johnson’s parents sued the funeral home that handled their son’s body; that suit is still pending.
Additionally, the gym was such a bloodbath that a retired FBI agent who reviewed previously-released video and 700 pictures concluded that Johnson had been murdered. There were two different coroners’ reports in the case file–and the first slammed deputies for not calling the coroner within six hours of finding Johnson’s body, among other things. Respected forensic video analyst Grant Fredericks reviewed surveillance video from the gym and concluded that at least an hour of footage was missing.
I suspect the missing video, more than anything else, hamstrung any effort to find evidence of civil rights violations. That’s a shame, because everything about this case screams “cover-up” in capital letters. From where I’m sitting, Johnson was murdered–and whoever did this needs to remember that there is no statute of limitations for murder.
