The body of Kendrick Johnson, 17, was found upside-down in a large mat in his high school gym in 2013. The county sheriff said the death, initially ruled an accident, should be investigated again.
When Kendrick Johnson of Valdosta, Ga., didn’t come home the night of Jan. 10, 2013, his family called the police.
The next morning, students at Lowndes High School found Kendrick’s body head down and wedged inside a heavy gym mat in the school’s gymnasium. Within months, the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office concluded the death was an accident: Kendrick had suffocated after he became stuck in the mat, trying to retrieve a shoe that had fallen inside.
His parents, however, said they believed their son, a popular athlete at the school and, at 17, the youngest of five siblings, had been murdered. For years, they pleaded with local and federal authorities to re-examine the case.
Last Friday, the current Lowndes County sheriff, Ashley Paulk, who was not in office when a previous sheriff had concluded that the death was accidental, decided that his office would reopen the case, which continues to confound residents of Valdosta, a city of about 56,000 in southern Georgia, eight years on.
“I’ve never told anybody what I believe about this case, whether it was accidental or murder,” Sheriff Paulk said on Wednesday. “I would never say that until I could see all the evidence.”
He added: “If it was an accident, it’s a very, very unusual way for something to happen.”
Kendrick’s father, Kenneth Johnson, said he would not feel any relief or closure until there had been an arrest in his son’s case.
“I’m hoping the truth comes out — the truth that we already know,” Mr. Johnson said. “My son was murdered.”
The decision came after county and federal investigations, and multiple federal lawsuits filed by Kendrick Johnson’s parents, who had accused the Lowndes County school board, the Sheriff’s Office and the father of two boys who they believed were responsible for their son’s death of conspiring to hide the circumstances.
The lawsuits, none of which were successful in civil court, said that Kendrick had gotten into a fight with two boys just before he died. One of the boys had threatened Kendrick, telling him, “It ain’t over,” according to the complaints. The boys were never charged.
In May 2013, the medical examiner at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation issued an autopsy report that determined the cause of death was “positional asphyxia,” suggesting that Kendrick had become trapped upside-down in the rolled-up mat and suffocated.
The report prompted the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office to close its investigation.
But in June 2013, Kendrick’s body was exhumed at the request of his parents, who hired a forensic pathologist, William Anderson of Orlando, Fla., to conduct another autopsy.
Dr. Anderson said that the cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the right side of the boy’s neck, near the jaw.
In October of that year, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia began investigating the case.
Investigators said they interviewed nearly 100 people, reviewed tens of thousands of emails and text messages, and looked at surveillance videos from the high school.
They also consulted with an independent medical examiner from the Defense Department, who examined the autopsy reports.
Federal prosecutors said that to bring the case to trial, they needed to be able to prove not only that Kendrick had been killed, but that the killing had been “motivated by racial animus.” In 2016, they announced that they had decided to close the case.
“Federal investigators determined that there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone or some group of people willfully violated Kendrick Johnson’s civil rights or committed any other prosecutable federal crime,” prosecutors said in a statement at the time.
Dr. Anderson said in an interview on Wednesday that federal officials had told him they agreed with his findings but could not pursue charges because there was no evidence of a civil rights violation.
Dr. Anderson said he believed that there had been a fight in the gym during which Kendrick was most likely placed in a sort of stranglehold by his perpetrators, who might not have intended to kill him.
“It probably happened very quickly and they panicked,” Dr. Anderson said.
He said that for Kendrick to die of positional asphyxiation, there would have had to have been fluid in his lungs. The state autopsy report did not cite such an observation, he said.
Dr. Anderson said he also offered his findings to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, but the office declined to examine them. A spokeswoman for the bureau declined to comment on Wednesday, citing Sheriff Paulk’s decision to reopen the case.
In 2016, Sheriff Paulk, who had retired the year before Kendrick died, ran again for his old office and won.
In April 2019, he wrote a letter to federal prosecutors saying that he had met with Kendrick’s father and a captain in the Sheriff’s Office. All three agreed that it was “vitally important” that they receive any unreleased files related to the federal investigation, Sheriff Paulk wrote.
Last December, federal prosecutors told him he could have the case file — which he described as “17 filing cabinets” worth of records, computer towers and hard drives. Sheriff Paulk said that the federal file was the final missing piece he needed to give the case a full examination.
He said he was hopeful he would be able to present a conclusion about the case in six months.
“It’s going to be a lot of work, but I think the people deserve it,” he said. “I think the family deserves it.”
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