Death of Kendrick Johnson
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Hello, the world. We are They Will Kill, a true crime podcast. I'm Courtney Eck. And I'm Sadie Eck. And we are sisters that want to tell you about lesser known murders. Our cases are always compelling, maybe even a little scary, with just enough banter to keep it interesting. You can find us at theywillkill.com or anywhere you listen to podcasts. See you there. See ya.

Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised. In January 2013, a 17-year-old high school student from Georgia didn't return home from school. When 8 o'clock becomes 9 o'clock becomes 10 o'clock, his parents begin to worry about their son. Around midnight, Kendrick Johnson is reported missing.

The following morning, his parents learn that their all-star son missed fourth and fifth period the day before, something that was completely out of character for the student. Nearly 21 hours after Kendrick Johnson was last seen, a couple students make a shocking discovery right there inside of the school's gym, a discovery that would leave everyone wondering why.

What happened to Kendrick Johnson? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 44. The death of Kendrick Johnson. ♪♪

Thank you.

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that discusses real, bone-chilling true crime stories and how forensic science has been used in the case. Some cases have been solved through cutting-edge forensic techniques, while other cases remain unsolved.

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Hi everyone. Before we get into the episode, I just wanted to extend my thoughts to those frontline workers who right at this very moment are fighting wildfires right here in my home of Southern California. My thoughts also go out to those who have had to evacuate their homes during this time. These fires here in California are just another thing being thrown at us here in 2020.

But just like everything else, we will get through this. Okay, I hope you're ready for this week's story because it is a wild ride. One day, I have an opinion about a case. The next day, I've completely changed my mind about it.

Even while researching this case for this week's episode, I kept trying to wrap my brain around what really happened to 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson. His story is one where the forensic science can be confusing. Depending on how you look at it, the forensics can tell two completely different stories.

If you follow the forensics one way, it makes you believe we're looking at a homicide. If you follow the forensics the other way, you see a tragic, tragic accident that, frankly, should have never happened. So let's take the leap together. Let's see what the forensic evidence tells us, and we can make our own conclusions about what really happened.

Back in January 2013, Kendrick Johnson lived with his family in Valtosta, Georgia, and was just a typical 17-year-old high school at Lowndes High School. Kendrick's family and friends described him as a sweet kid who could also be a guy who was shy and quiet. He was remembered as being extremely athletic and

At one point, he was playing three different sports at a single time. Back in 2013, he was just a young teenager with hopes and dreams of someday playing professional football. On the night of January 10th, 2013, just a couple days after students returned back to school from winter break, Kendrick didn't return home from school.

Kendrick's mom, Jackie Johnson, knew that her son planned to stay at school to watch a basketball game on campus that day. But when 7 o'clock became 8 o'clock became 9 o'clock p.m. and still no sign of her son, she started to worry. Her son was a good kid, not a kid who would just not come home from school one day and not tell his parents what he was doing.

This was completely out of character for Kendrick Johnson. A little after midnight, Kendrick's mom filed a missing persons report. But not uncommon. The police department didn't really take this case too seriously when the report came across their desks. Kendrick was 17 years old.

Maybe he was just out there doing what 17-year-old boys do sometimes. It hadn't even been 24 hours yet. So the police essentially did nothing with this missing persons report. The following morning, January 11th, Kendrick still hadn't returned home. Now really worried, his mom decided to go to the high school herself.

And when she arrived at school, she learned from his teachers that Kendrick actually missed both third and fourth period the day before, which also was completely out of character for him. The high school that Kendrick attended had two gyms. One gym was known as the old gym and the other one, the bigger one, was the new gym.

This totally brings me back to my high school days because at my high school, we also had two gyms. There was the quote big gym and the little gym and they were right next to each other. For us, the big gym was always reserved for those big high school games and then the little gym was the older one and was only really used when there were maybe more than one events or practices going on.

So back to Georgia, on January 11th, a couple students were hanging out inside of the gym. And in one of the far corners of the gym, there were rolled up mats. These mats were used as wrestling mats, gymnastic mats for the students. They were pretty big mats. They were a little over six feet tall when stacked up vertically.

Normally, these mats were stored in the corner of the gym lying down on their sides. But sometime over the winter break, the mats had been stacked vertically. And that's how they were stacked on January 11th. So a couple students were hanging out in the gym and they noticed something sticking out of the top of one of those mats. They decided to get a little closer.

They climbed up on a couple bleachers, and they spotted what they thought looked like a pair of white socks. At first, the students thought that this was some sort of prank, that someone took a white sock, put it on top of the mat, and made it look like someone was stuck inside of the rolled-up mat. The kind of practical joke you'd expect out of any teenager. But when the students got closer...

and they looked down the inside of the rolled-up mat, they know that something is wrong. They know this isn't a prank. The students quickly ran out of the gym, and they ran into a PE teacher walking down the hall. They told the teacher, hey, hey, you need to come see this. We think someone might be stuck inside one of those rolled-up mats inside of the gym. Skeptical,

The teacher followed the students into the gym, followed them to the rolled up mats in the far corner, and the teacher himself got up on the bleacher so he could take a closer look inside. And as he stares down the inside of the rolled up wrestling mat, he could have never prepared himself for what he saw.

Inside the rolled up mat, he saw not just one white sock. He saw two white socks. But it wasn't just socks sticking up from the top of the mat. He saw what appeared to be human feet.

At the shocking discovery of human feet sticking out of the mat, one of the students pulled out his cell phone to immediately call 911. And as 911 is on the other line, the PE teacher knocked the mat over on its side and attempted to pull out whoever was inside.

The second that that mat hit the gym floor, the unmistakable scent of decomposition suffocated the air. This was no high school practical joke. As quickly as the scent of decomposition hit the air, the students and teacher not only saw blood pouring out of the mat, they saw vomit. This was now a crime scene.

The body found rolled up inside of the mat was identified as missing 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson. When the police arrived at the gym, the school was immediately placed into lockdown. Kids and teachers were instructed to remain inside their classrooms. The police then notified Jackie, Kendrick's mother, that her son had been found dead.

hanging vertically inside of a gym mat for nearly 21 hours. On January 10th, the day Kendrick was last seen, he had a fitness class and he went to the old gym on campus. Students at Kendrick's high school had to pay for their lockers. They weren't just provided one.

So Kendrick and many other students who didn't want to pay for lockers would put their gym shoes inside of the rolled up mats in the old gym. This was kind of like the well-known secret around campus that if you couldn't afford a locker, you would take your gym shoes and you would stuff them into these mats.

This was something that a lot of the students did, the ones that didn't have lockers. They would hide their shoes inside the mats and just pull them out for gym class. Kendrick was one of those kids. The gym mats were usually rolled up on the ground, making it really easy for kids to just stuff their gym shoes inside. They wouldn't be just out in the open anymore.

But sometime during winter break, the mats were all placed standing up. These mats would have stood just about six feet tall and they were about three feet wide. So they were a pretty decent size. Kendrick's gym shoes would have been at the bottom of one of these mats. Now, we have no idea why the mats were moved upright during winter break.

I've read some articles that say they added additional mats to the gym, so that's why they were all stacked up instead of lying down. Other articles I read offered no explanation for why they had been moved. Whatever the case is, whatever the truth is, the mat containing Kendrick's gym shoes that he would have needed for fitness class had been moved upright.

Pretty quickly after the discovery of Kendrick's body, the Lowndes County Sheriff's Department came out to say that they believed that on January 10th, Kendrick climbed on top of the mat, saw that his gym shoes were at the bottom of the mat, and then while trying to get his shoes out for class, he got stuck, hanging upside down with no way of getting himself out.

While hanging upside down, he started to suffocate. He was unable to breathe because it was so tight in there. And because of his positioning inside of the mat, they believed he died of what is called positional asphyxia. So this condition occurs when an individual can't get enough air or oxygen because of how their body is positioned.

This type of asphyxia typically happens with babies. We hardly ever see this happen in either teenagers or adults. It's more common with babies because they can kind of get into different positions, typically in their cribs, when they can't breathe and then they can't figure out how to move out of that position in order to breathe.

It's a very rare cause of death for adults. In fact, Kendrick's case is probably the most well-known documented cases in which a 17-year-old, nearly an adult, passed away from positional asphyxia. So just to provide you guys with some sort of perspective here, we've already said that the Matts were about six feet tall.

When the mats were rolled up, the mat left a 14-inch hole in diameter across the center. Kendrick wasn't a tiny guy. In fact, he was around 5 feet 10 inches tall and his shoulders measured about 19 inches across.

he would have had to somehow scrunch his shoulders together just to be able to fit inside of the 14-inch hole in order to even get inside of the mat. This part is a little graphic, but the coroner believed that Kendrick was hanging upside down inside the mat for around 21 hours.

During this time period, blood had rushed to Kendrick's head, causing the blood to begin pouring out of his facial orifices, including his nose, his mouth, and his ears. This explains the blood that the students and the teacher who first discovered Kendrick saw when they tipped the mat over. But,

Exactly where Kendrick's blood was discovered is what really takes this case in an unusual direction. Besides Kendrick's body, there were two pairs of shoes inside of the mat. One pair of shoes were presumed to be the pair of shoes that Kendrick had been wearing prior to getting inside of the mat. That's because these shoes were found near his feet and legs inside of the mat.

The other pair of shoes, the shoes that are presumed to be the pair that he was trying to get out of the mat, were on the floor, underneath his body, right near his head. But here's where it gets interesting. There was no blood found on top of the shoes, the ones at the bottom of the mat, the pair that Kendrick was reaching for. The shoes were lying on top of the pool of blood.

There was no blood on the shoes themselves, just underneath. So let's think about that for a second. Kendrick tried to get his gym shoes out of the bottom of the mat. He got stuck. Blood rushed to his head. After dying from positional suffocation, blood began to pour from his facial orifices, but the blood didn't get on the actual gym shoes themselves.

which would have been right underneath his body. There was only blood found underneath the shoes, the shoes he was supposedly trying to get out of the mat. When Kendrick was unrolled from the mat by the teacher, he had one of his arms stretched out above his head, reaching for the shoe, and the other arm was right down by his waist. Again, both shoes he was wearing were off. They were also inside of the mat.

and was just wearing a pair of white socks that had been partially taken off his feet. This positioning and location of the shoes tells me that he probably kicked off his shoes while trying to get out. Now, next to the mat containing Kendrick's body, there was a hoodie and a pair of orange and black gym shoes just lying on the gym floor.

Neither the hoodie or the orange and black gym shoes were ever taken into custody by the police because neither of these items were really thought of as having anything to do with the investigation. A team of forensic experts took a look at every square inch of the gym for any signs of possible foul play or anything to make the investigators believe that this wasn't an accident.

The forensics team did find traces of blood on one of the walls inside of the gym. But when the blood was tested, it did not belong to Kendrick and it wasn't his blood. In fact, the blood they found on the gym wall was pretty old. They believed that it was possibly left there weeks, even months prior to Kendrick's death. So it was completely irrelevant to the case.

Forensics also found bloody tissues inside one of the girls' bathrooms in the gym. This was also tested where it came back as female DNA, again, having nothing to do with Kendrick's case. So there really wasn't any forensic evidence around the gym besides what was inside of the mat that really provided anything new to investigators.

There wasn't really anything from a forensic standpoint that pointed to foul play. If Kendrick had been in some sort of physical altercation before being placed inside of the mat, we would expect to find maybe blood, something around the mats belonging to a third party. But we just don't see that here.

Within 24 hours after discovering Kendrick's body, the sheriff's department ruled his death an accident. The first autopsy on Kendrick's body ruled his death an accident, and the cause of death was positional suffocation. The sheriff's department interviewed the students and the teacher who discovered his body, and everything about their story seemed to check out.

There wasn't anything suspicious about their story. They didn't have different versions of events that day. Everything about what they said seemed to line up. Investigators also reviewed the school surveillance cameras. Even though it would take months for the Johnson family to finally review the tapes themselves, an issue we'll talk about in just a moment, but the camera footage around the gym was

caught only a few seconds of Kendrick on January 10th. The school itself had 40 cameras in and around the areas of the gym. Each camera had around 48 hours worth of footage, which comes out to be 1,900 plus hours of footage that exists, which is a lot. So there's one camera from inside the gym that caught Kendrick.

running across the bottom of the screen, headed in the direction of the mats. This would have been right around the time Kendrick would have gotten stuck. And on the camera, there's several students in the gym playing basketball at the same time. All you can really see is Kendrick go across the bottom and head towards the corner where the mats were. And that's pretty much it.

He's inside of the frame for one, maybe two seconds. I think the important thing we learned about this camera angle was that he did head towards the direction of where the mats were. And there was another camera just outside of the gym that looked like it's in the hallway that also caught Kendrick right before he entered the gym.

You see a couple other students around him, but nobody appeared to follow Kendrick either before or follow him into the gym. He was just kind of walking by himself. It's kind of like the first video. You see him for just a few seconds and that's it. He walks out of frame. The surveillance cameras certainly don't explain anything about what really happened either before or after he went inside of the gym.

I will post both videos to the website ForensicTales.com so you can look at them and you can see if you find anything interesting. Now, I know what you're thinking. If there were so many cameras around campus, there must have been a camera pointed towards the corner of the gym with the mats, right? Wrong.

There was a camera, camera G5, that aimed at the general direction of where the rolled up mats were inside of the gym. Camera G5 was even motion activated. The problem was the mat that Kendrick was inside of was out of range for camera G5. This is one of the only parts of the entire gym that isn't able to be caught on camera.

So as many cameras as there were and as many hours of footage they had from that day, none of it recorded the area where the mats were. Police felt confident in their conclusion that this was an accident. They had the coroner's report. They reviewed the camera footage that didn't show any evidence of foul play. They didn't find any forensic evidence linking his death to another student.

and they pulled class records of several students who went to the gym that day. Nothing was out of the ordinary, at least according to the sheriff's department. The Johnson family, however, thought that this conclusion came way too quick. When police arrived at the high school, they didn't even call the coroner for six hours, which is problematic from an investigative standpoint because

Because in a death investigation, every minute, every hour is important when we want to determine a proper cause or manner of death. The longer it takes for the coroner to get there, the more risk there is that evidence is going to be lost. So the Johnson family thought that the police were way too quick to rule this one an accident.

There didn't seem to be any investigation into the possibility that foul play may have been involved here. It's also concerning when the police arrived on scene and quickly jumped to conclusions because they didn't even call the coroner for six hours tells me that the sheriff's department believed it was an accident within moments of arriving at the gym.

There was no other possible explanation here. And because six hours had passed, the coroner may have seen, may have observed something that possibly could have changed the course of the investigation. Besides being a problem from an investigative standpoint, it's also against Georgia law. In the state of Georgia, when a death is reported, the coroner is to be contacted immediately.

Waiting six hours to notify the coroner's office is completely unacceptable. It's pretty clear that the Lowndes County Sheriff's Department believed that right from the get-go, this was a tragic accident. So the investigators working the scene didn't really see the urgency to notify the coroner. They believed Kendrick reached down inside the standing mat, tried to get his gym shoes, and ultimately got stuck and couldn't breathe.

But just as quickly as the sheriff's department concluded Kendrick's death was an accident, the Johnson's family approached Reverend Floyd Rose with the Valdosta Southern Christian Leadership Conference to run an independent investigation into the case. The SCLC is a very prominent African-American civil rights organization with founders like Martin Luther King Jr.,

The family did not believe this was an accident. They believe the police were way too quick to rule this one an accident. The Johnson family also pointed to the fact that if Kendrick's death was some sort of tragic accident, how could none of the other students inside the gym not hear him calling for help?

Remember, there were several other students in the gym. Many of them were playing basketball at the same time that Kendrick walked over to the mats to try to get his gym shoes. He wasn't alone in the gym. He didn't go in there in the middle of the night. So the Johnson family couldn't wrap their heads around the fact that nobody heard him call out for help. If we go back to the surveillance camera just for a second,

The first camera that spotted Kendrick running across the bottom of the frame headed in the direction of the mats. There were at least three other students inside of the gym playing basketball at the same exact time. These kids would have just been a few yards away from Kendrick. How could they not have heard him?

Now, it also has to be pointed out that Kendrick Johnson was black. All the investigators from the Lowndes County Sheriff's Department who worked on his case were white. Racism in Valdosta, Georgia back in 2013 was alive and well and still is today. We live in a culture where we cannot deny this fact. We cannot ignore it and we cannot dismiss it.

And the Johnson family certainly didn't turn a blind eye to race. The Johnsons believed that if their son was white, this case would have handled much differently. And that's exactly why the NAACP even got involved in the case and ended up helping the family and providing them resources to conduct this independent investigation.

Even with the help of the NAACP and many others, the Lowndes County Sheriff's Department refused to reopen Kendrick's case or even entertained the idea of changing their minds that this was some sort of accident.

So by April 2013, two months after Kendrick's death, the Johnson family and many of their supporters held a public rally to help bring additional attention to the case. They were really frustrated with the police and decided if they weren't going to do anything about it, that they would take matters into their own hands.

During the rally, several members of the Johnson family locked arms and blocked the entrance to the Lowndes County Courthouse. They wanted to make a statement as loud as they possibly could. Everyone involved was arrested for civil disobedience. Even when you're rallying, even when you're protesting, you cannot block the entrance to a courthouse.

And many people who supported the Johnson family were really, really upset. They believe that the police rushed to make a decision that they didn't consider the forensic evidence as it relates to the blood found inside of the mat underneath the shoes. And because he was black, they didn't properly investigate it right from the beginning.

Reverend Floyd Rose, the individual the Johnson family partnered with to jumpstart this independent investigation, was also the one who ended up posting bond for Jackie Johnson, Kendrick's mom. She was one who did lock her arms, who did block the entrance to the courthouse and was arrested. So Reverend was the one that posted the bond and ultimately got her released from jail.

The Johnson family released several photos to the public. In fact, most of the crime scene photos or any subsequent photo of Kendrick wasn't released by the police. It was the Johnson family themselves who published the photos, basically an attempt to bring additional attention to the case. They wanted to do whatever was necessary to keep his case out there in the media.

So one of the photos the family released was a picture of Kendrick and how he looked when his body arrived at the funeral home. It is a very graphic photo. And full disclosure, if you go to our website, we always post photos from each episode. But these are very graphic.

So just please keep that in mind if you do go to ForensicTales.com. This particular photo is disturbing. So the photo the family releases to the media shows Kendrick's face. His face is extremely swollen. He's got bruising all up and down his face. It's hard to believe that this was even the same person at all. If you've seen a photo of Kendrick Johnson before...

and then you looked at this shot, it's pretty much unrecognizable. It's really bad. While researching each case we cover on the show, I always encounter different crime scene photos, autopsy photos. I've seen it all, at least when it comes to the cases that we've covered so far on the show.

But to be completely honest with you guys, this photo of Kendrick Johnson is one of the most disturbing I have ever seen. When you see this photo of him, you'll never be able to forget it. It's hard to look at the photo and think that this was some sort of accident. So once this photo of Kendrick at the funeral home was released,

The public outcry for the case to be reopened and reinvestigated for something other than an accident really went through the roof. People saw this photo of Kendrick's face. They saw the swelling. They saw the bruising. And they couldn't believe this was caused by simply getting stuck inside of a gym mat.

the public began to really rally behind the Johnson family, who believed their son was murdered, that this was no tragic accident, that this was now a quest to uncover the truth. In June 2013, the court granted the Johnson family the ability to exhume Kendrick's body in order for there to be a second autopsy done. This came after a heated court battle.

Anytime we exhume a body, something that is highly evasive and highly controversial, it's a decision that is not made lightly. There has to be some reason why we're going to exhume somebody. Remember, the first autopsy concluded that he was killed by accident and that the cause of death was positional suffocation.

But the Johnson family wanted an independent autopsy to be done. They didn't want an autopsy to be done by the same department that they thought did a shoddy job from the beginning. So the second independent autopsy was performed by a private pathologist by the name of Dr. William Anderson.

During the second autopsy, it was discovered that all of Kendrick's organs had been removed from his body and that they were missing. Even more troubling was that Kendrick's body had been stuffed with newspaper. Yes, newspaper.

Now, to be clear and to be fair, newspaper was something that pathologists used to stuff bodies with after an autopsy in order to make the body presentable for funerals. But this was a really old practice. This isn't something we typically see in autopsies, even back in 2013.

It's hard to imagine, but filling bodies with newspapers isn't illegal in Georgia. Now, it might not be the best practice for a number of obvious reasons, but the funeral home who handled Kendrick's body after the first autopsy didn't break any Georgia laws by doing this. It may be insensitive, but it wasn't illegal.

So for the second autopsy, the pathologist wasn't able to examine any of Kendrick's organs because they had all been removed. But he was still able to reach his own cause of death in the case. Dr. Anderson found evidence that completely contradicted the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's findings in the first autopsy. This pathologist determined that Kendrick died from blunt force trauma.

Specifically, trauma to the right side of the neck. The pathologist discovered a two to three centimeter bruise on the right side of Kendrick's neck. A bruise that was not documented during the first autopsy. Even though there weren't any broken neck bones, he didn't have any broken bones in his throat,

The pathologist concluded that a single blow to the neck could in fact cause death, and he believed was the likely cause in Kendrick's case. The pathologist was careful though to say that the condition of Kendrick's face as seen in the photo that the family released didn't contribute to his findings that he died from blunt force trauma.

He actually agreed with the pathologist from the first autopsy that how Kendrick's face looked and the condition of it was due to the fact that Kendrick's body was positioned upside down in the mat. That the bruising and the swelling to his face was caused by hanging upside down for nearly 24 hours.

So his conclusion of blunt force trauma was strictly based on the bruising to the neck area. Now, the issue of the missing organs was also dismissed by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. That's because the coroner in the first autopsy claimed that the organs weren't sent to the funeral home, not because of any intentional misconduct, but

but because the organs were badly decomposed and that they had decomposed prior to the body being transported to the funeral home. It's not uncommon, it is not illegal for the medical examiner's office to dispose of the organs prior to turning the body either over to the family or prior to sending it to the funeral home. So it was nothing illegal that was done here.

But the Johnson family wasn't happy with this, so they initiated a lawsuit against the funeral home, both because of the newspaper and the missing organs. The lawsuit claimed that both aspects suggested a cover-up was happening in order to hide the real cause of death here.

The lawsuit against the funeral home ended up being dropped. The lawsuit didn't really go far because the family lacked really any sufficient evidence to support this claim. Regardless of the lawsuit, the missing organs, and the ruling of blunt force trauma in the second autopsy,

only furthered the Johnson's family's suspicions that Kendrick was murdered, that the entire investigation was a cover-up. By October 2013, now close to 10 months after Kendrick's death, Matthew Moore, a U.S. attorney in Georgia, announced that his department was going to formally review the case. This was huge news.

Because the Johnson family and their supporters had been saying for months that the GBI was attempting to cover up the real cause of Kendrick's death. That they rushed to conclusions right from the get-go and now armed with this second autopsy finding coupled with the support of organizations like the NAACP,

The state of Georgia was pretty much forced to reopen this case. So that's exactly what they did. They reopened it. So while authorities agreed to reopen Kendrick's case, this was right around the same time when the SCLC, one of the biggest organizations who were backing the Johnson family, decided to withdraw their support of the Kendrick Johnson case.

The SCLC and the NAACP had agreed to conduct their own independent investigation into the case, and they both agreed to help support the Johnson family. They were providing a lot of financial assistance. But while doing their independent investigation on their own, the SCLC ended up reaching the same conclusions about Kendrick's case that the Sheriff's Department did.

After their investigation was said and done, the SELC said, as tragic as it was, they believed it was an accident. That nobody caused Kendrick's death. And that this wasn't about race at all. This was obviously crushing to the Johnson family.

Not only because the family wanted the NAACP and the SCLC to publicly support the family and publicly state that Kendrick was murdered, that this wasn't some freak accident, the family also wanted the organizations to help make public who they thought was responsible for Kendrick's death.

The Johnson family believed that Kendrick's death may have been caused by two white brothers. The identity of the brothers has not been confirmed, but many sources identify the brothers as being Brian and Brandon Bell. The Johnsons believed that Brian and Brandon Bell killed Kendrick because of a fight they had about a year prior to the incident.

The family believed that the fight had escalated over the past year, causing the brothers to confront Kendrick inside of the gym and then stage it to look like an accident. The Johnsons thought that the police were trying to cover this up because Brian and Brandon's father worked as an FBI agent.

And we all know about the code of silence, the blue code within the law enforcement community. One officer covers for the other. So the family thought that the sheriff's department was covering for one of their own, that they were following the code of silence. So Brian Bell and Kendrick Johnson had been friends for many years. They reportedly got into a fight while on their way to a football game together.

The fight was about one year before Kendrick's death, and several classmates came forward claiming that the two squashed it pretty early, that this wasn't really a big fight. It wasn't a big deal. Classmates of theirs said, yeah, they fought, but this was a long time ago, and they've been really close ever since. It wasn't a big deal. In fact, after the fight, Kendrick

Brian and Kendrick reportedly worked on a science project together, and they worked on it together voluntarily. They weren't stuck with one another. So at the time of Kendrick's death, Brian Bell was believed to be in a classroom nowhere near the gym or near the mats. Brian's teacher and classmates provided an alibi that he was nowhere near Kendrick. He couldn't have been in two places at once.

As far as Brian's brother, Brandon Bell, at the time of Kendrick's murder, Brandon was on his way to a wrestling match in Macon, Georgia. Now, there's some confusion as to the exact time that Brandon and his teammates left to the wrestling match. Originally, it was believed that the bus, which Brandon was on, left the high school at 1230 p.m. on the day of Kendrick's death.

But then an attorney for the Johnson family later on claimed to have recovered the travel log that recorded the school bus leaving at 4 o'clock p.m. If the bus left at 4 o'clock p.m., Brandon could have certainly been inside of the gym at the same time as Kendrick.

The problem with the Johnson's family attorney's claim is that it wasn't really a travelogue that he was looking at. He was looking at a trip request form that was filled out by one of the wrestling coaches who filled out the trip request form weeks before January 10th.

So the 4 o'clock p.m. time on the note wasn't referencing what time the bus would leave to the wrestling match, but rather the time that the match was supposed to start. This would mean he was nowhere near the school's gym that afternoon.

Now, if you eliminate the travelogue or the trip request form completely, you take it out of the equation. Brandon Bell's wrestling coach, teammates, teachers, all provided alibis that supported the fact that he was nowhere near Kendrick that day and he was not inside of the gym. He couldn't have had anything to do with his death. It was impossible.

But still, in 2015, the Johnsons filed a $100 million lawsuit against 38 people. The lawsuit named three classmates of Kendrick's, the high school, the crime lab that handled the evidence in the case, several state and federal officials, five agents of the GBI, and

One federal agent and a handful of other people were named in this $100 million lawsuit. And the basis of the lawsuit was that Kendrick was killed by either Brandon or Brian Bell, who were the sons of an FBI agent, and that the agent used his connections within the law enforcement community to create a cover-up.

Now, even though the family brought forward this $100 million lawsuit, Kendrick's father admitted that they didn't really have any hard evidence to support their claim. So shortly after Kendrick's father came forward with that admission, the entire lawsuit was dropped. This didn't mean that the legal battle was anywhere close to being over with.

Because once this lawsuit was dropped, the Johnson family was sued by several of the same individuals who they sued earlier. The Johnsons were being sued for $850,000 in order to cover attorney fees and defamation charges.

These people wanted their money back for having to defend themselves in a case that they believed was completely baseless. There was no evidence. So the court ultimately ruled that the Johnsons had to pay close to $300,000 worth of attorney fees for each defendant that they named in the lawsuit that they really didn't have any evidence for.

The court pretty much agreed that the Johnson family didn't have any evidence to accuse most of the people named in the lawsuit and in return ordered the family to cover their attorney costs. The court argued, why should these people have to pay out of their own pockets, use their own money to defend themselves in a case where there wasn't sufficient evidence? Now, one more thing before we'll move on.

Even though the Johnson family was ordered to pay $300,000, it is unclear whether or not the family has begun to pay any of that amount. In June 2016, the U.S. attorney who agreed to reopen Kendrick's case made an announcement that no charges would be filed against anyone in Kendrick's death.

The U.S. attorney cited insufficient evidence to support any federal charges. This basically meant that no one was going to be charged with murdering Kendrick Johnson. And this also meant that the case was officially closed. They weren't going to keep investigating it. But what this didn't mean was that it was closed in the eyes of the Johnsons.

Because in June 2018, Kendrick's body was exhumed for the second time in order for a third autopsy to be performed. The independent medical examiner confirmed the second autopsy's findings that the cause of death was from blunt force trauma.

However, this third and private medical examiner believed that the trauma to the right side of Kendrick's neck was likely caused from a 45-pound dumbbell, something that was never mentioned, never discussed in any part of the investigation prior to this third autopsy.

It's also important to note that there were no dumbbells found in or around that mat. Okay, I think this is a good time for us to go back to the surveillance footage at the high school. I mentioned that it took the Johnson family months to get their hands on the surveillance footage in and around the gym.

And once the family did finally get access to the footage, they believed that the videos had been altered. Specifically, they believed that the timestamps didn't match and that some of the footage had been deleted entirely.

So these videos have been extensively looked at, not only by law enforcement, but several media outlets throughout Georgia looked into this claim that somehow the footage in and around the school's gym had either been altered or tampered with in some sort of way prior to the Johnson family getting it.

But there wasn't a single media outlet that claimed or supported this idea that the footage had been altered in any way. The Johnson family now has the results of a third autopsy. They believe that the surveillance footage on campus had been altered before turning over to them. And they believed that the evidence was mishandled at the scene. And with that,

They continue to push for the state of Georgia to reopen Kendrick's case. And the family still has a pending lawsuit against the funeral home that received Kendrick's body. This fight is nowhere near over for this family. Kendrick Johnson's family still very much believes that he was murdered, that his murder was subsequently covered up by the police.

They believe that race was certainly a factor as to why his case was ruled an accident and why it wasn't properly investigated. And the two suspects they believed killed Kendrick are the sons of an FBI agent, furthering this belief or suspicion that a police cover-up is in place. I struggle with the idea that this was a cover-up.

But there is a piece of evidence here that I have trouble wrapping my brain around. And that is where the blood was found inside of the mat. Remember, the gym shoes that Kendrick was allegedly reaching for were at the bottom of the mat. The blood, which would have poured out of his facial orifices, was only found underneath the shoes.

There was no blood found on top of the shoes or even on the shoes themselves. This fact troubles me. It makes me question the law of gravity, right? If Kendrick was hanging upside down inside of the mat, reaching for his shoes, looking

He can't breathe. He passes away and blood starts to pool towards his head. Why didn't any of the blood get on top of the shoes? But there's also the conclusion that can be drawn that when the blood started to pool towards his head, it dripped onto the floor and started to pool around the shoes.

It just so happened that the blood didn't hit the shoes, but just pooled around them, giving this illusion that the shoes were on top of the blood, when in reality the blood just pooled around them. But I also wonder how he was able to squeeze into the mat. Given his physical size and given what we know about the diameter of the mats, the

But I can also accept a conclusion that he could have easily manipulated his body in a way that allowed him to get at least halfway down the mat. We know that he was a bigger guy, so he may have been able to get halfway down, but he wasn't able to get halfway back up. And there's an elephant in the room.

How could he have gotten himself stuck and nobody, no other kid hear or see him? If you ask me what I find most troubling about this case, it's right there. It's that no other kid heard or saw anything. I think these are all legitimate concerns or questions that the Johnson family also has.

Even though the court ordered them to pay over $300,000 in legal fees to the people they accused in their son's murder, I think the Johnson family will continue to fight for justice for Kendrick. I don't think we're at the end of this story just yet, which my promise to you guys is always whenever we talk about a case that I think there might be an update, I will absolutely cover it and we will talk about it once it happens.

But as always, I want to hear from you guys. I want to hear from my listeners what you think about Kendrick's case. Based on the evidence and the facts of the case, do you believe the police came to the right decision about his death? Or does the evidence make you support the Johnson family? You can join in on the discussion on Instagram at Forensic Tales.

You can also chat with me on our website, ForensicTales.com. This is also where you can go to check out the photos we talked about and also check out clips from the school surveillance cameras. Also, I love getting emails from you guys. So shoot me an email at Courtney at ForensicTales.com. For me, this is a really interesting case that I have found myself going back and forth on.

So I definitely want to hear if you're in the same boat or if you've already made up your mind on this one. Okay, you guys, that just about covers it for this week. Please stay healthy out there. Stay safe. ♪

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