Kendrick Johnson death: Sheriff reopens probe into Georgia teen's case after doctor finds blunt force trauma
On January 13, 2013, 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson was found dead and rolled up in a gym mat at Lowndes County High School in Georgia. His death was originally ruled an accident from "positional asphyxia" as state and local investigators concluded he had climbed into the mat, became stuck, and suffocated to death. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice found that there wasn't enough evidence to prove a federal crime, Fox News reported.
Eight years later, however, a new sheriff has reopened the case. Furthermore, a doctor who conducted an independent autopsy on the teenager has declared that it was medically impossible for him to have died as described initially.
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"Originally it was called ‘positional asphyxia,’" Dr William Anderson told Fox News. "They felt he crawled in down the gym mat and into the middle of it, to try to get a sneaker — which of course doesn’t make any sense because all you’d have to do is knock the gym mat over on its side, and the sneaker would be at the bottom."
The doctor explained that positional asphyxia happens when the victim is trapped in a way that they cannot breathe properly and then suffocates to death as their muscles get exhausted and can't overcome the pressure on their chest. The evidence would be obvious as such a demise can take hours, but the state's autopsy showed Johnson's lungs were "basically normal."
"To make that diagnosis, you need to have the evidence of the ongoing respiratory distress," he said. "Otherwise, the person doesn’t die." Instead, Anderson's independent autopsy found that Johnson was killed from blunt force trauma to his neck, likely caused during a physical altercation.
"It could have been accidental in that they were putting pressure on his neck and didn’t mean to kill him," he said. "He certainly didn’t go into the gym and have positional asphyxia, because the hallmark findings for positional asphyxia aren’t there. So you can’t make a diagnosis, scientifically, if you don’t have the evidence." State investigators were not keen to look at his findings, Anderson said.
That said, the new investigation is being led by Lowndes County Sheriff Ashley Paulk, who has reportedly obtained case files from all of the state, local, and federal agencies that were involved in the probe of Johnson's 2013 death. Paulk said he would look for inconsistencies by comparing the evidence. "We finally acquired, after many years of asking and begging and pleading, we got the federal files," he told Fox News. "They were shipped to us on February 11."
At the end of its investigation, the Justice Department said it had interviewed close to 100 people, scoured through thousands of emails and text messages, and gone through hours of surveillance footage from the school.
According to Paulk, federal authorities had initially denied his requests for the documents, but Johnson's parents were steadfast in their resolve to find the truth and kept up the pressure. "Really I give credit to the Johnson family," he said. "They persevered, and they found some allies in certain places, and they’re the ones that finally, in my opinion, were, the determining factor."
Paulk, a veteran of the force, told Fox News he expects the reopened investigation to take at least six months to bear any real results, or even longer if the situation demands it.