Seventeen-year-old Kendrick Johnson was found dead in a rolled-up wrestling mat on January 11, and at the time local law enforcement said they suspected he had become trapped inside the mat while trying to retrieve a shoe. An autopsy ruled the cause of death to be positional asphyxia, but that never sat well with Johnson’s parents. They had his body exhumed in June and requested an independent investigator to perform another autopsy.
What the examiner found was both suspicious and disturbing, and the Johnson’s have called on Benjamin Crump–lead prosecutor in the Trayvon Martin murder trial–because they believe he was murdered, and that their son’s case was improperly handled by law enforcement because he’s black.
Dr. William R. Anderson performed the second autopsy, and found evidence of blunt force trauma on the right side of Johnson’s neck, which appeared “non-accidental.” He also found that all of Johnson’s organs had been removed from his body, and had been replaced with old newspapers. Now, Johnson’s case has been reopened, and both the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the funeral home that handled Johnson’s burial are under investigation.
