ATLANTA — After over a decade, the family of a Georgia teen who was found dead, rolled up in a gym mat, said they're continuing to fight for justice by filing for a summary judgment in their lawsuit against law enforcement agencies over the investigations into the death and autopsies that determined it was accidental.
Kendrick Johnson's father, Kenneth Johnson, said he believes the search for justice is finally making progress. His son was discovered rolled up inside a wrestling mat in his high school in Valdosta in January 2013.
Officials originally said Kendrick intentionally crawled in the mat to get his shoe and suffocated –- ruling his death accidental.
But the Johnson family has long maintained someone killed Kendrick.
“We know all along they would not be able to dispute all the evidence we put forth, because it’s their own evidence,” Kenneth Johnson said.
Johnson said previously that marks appearing on Kendrick’s side were not self-inflicted and that his son, "didn’t get into the mat by himself."
And Kenneth Johnson said the very reports from law enforcement -- which his attorney said they now have only after discovery from filing a lawsuit in September against the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Lowndes County Sheriff's Office and Lowndes County Medical Examiner -- show inconsistencies.
The family is hoping a federal judge will find in their favor on the motion for summary judgment in that suit.
A Department of Justice investigation that closed in 2016 determined there was not enough evidence for federal civil rights violation charges, noting that "the government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt not only that someone killed Kendrick Johnson, but that the killing was motivated by racial animus" which would have been "a high threshold to meet."
The Lowndes County Sheriff's Office reopened the case in 2021 and, after 10 months, determined again that it was accidental. The GBI has not conducted its own investigation of the case, but it conducted an autopsy that the DOJ said in 2016 described a cause of death as accidental and resulting from positional asphyxia -- "essentially, that he became entrapped upside-down in the rolled-up mat and had suffocated."
A subsequent independent autopsy requested by the family determined the death was not accidental but caused by "blunt force trauma to the right side of Kendrick's neck, near the jaw." A third autopsy in 2018 also showed findings of "apparent, non-accidental, blunt force trauma" and that some of Kendrick's organs were missing.
Johnathan Burrs, the civil rights advocate on the suit, expanded on the family's arguments. He said several new details came out in their lawsuit discovery process, and with the new information, Kendrick's family filed the motion for summary judgment for a portion of the case.
That filing alleges the GBI and other defendants named in the suit have not adequately disputed the facts they allege. They are awaiting the judge’s decision within the next 30 days.
You can find the legal filing at the bottom of this story.
In addition, the family believes there is enough new information discovered via the lawsuit to potentially have the entire case reopened for investigation, since no one was ever charged with the death.
Burrs said the family filed an application to reopen the case in accordance with Georgia's recent Coleman-Baker Act, which created a process for the GBI to reinvestigate cold case murders.
11Alive reached out to the GBI for a comment, and they said they stand by their original autopsy.
A full GBI statement said:
"The GBI has received numerous inquiries from the public about our involvement in the 2013 Kendrick Johnson death investigation. This case was investigated by the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI, and the Department of Justice. Our agency assisted the Lowndes County Sheriff's Office in the case by processing the scene. Our Medical Examiner's Office conducted an autopsy on Johnson. This investigation is closed. All GBI documents pertaining to the case are available upon request through GBI's Open Records Unit.
The GBI Medical Examiner’s Office conducted a thorough autopsy on this case. The case is closed, and we stand behind our original findings."