It has been more than 12 years since 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson was found dead and wrapped up in a gym mat at a high school in Lowndes County, Georgia, and Kendrick’s family is still fighting to bring him some semblance of justice—or at least set the record straight about how the teen’s death was not just some unexplainable freak accident that no one in particular is responsible for.
According to WMGT 41, Kendrick’s parents, Kenneth and Jacquelyn Johnson, said in court documents pertaining to a $12 million lawsuit they filed last month that their son didn’t die the way it’s listed on his official state death certificate, and they want it changed.
Kenneth and Jacquelyn are suing the Georgia Department of Public Health over its refusal to change the teen’s cause of death from accidental positional asphyxia to non-accidental blunt force trauma. As we previously reported, an independent autopsy reportedly revealed that Kendrick suffered a blow to the neck before he died.
“We have filed the right paperwork,” Kenneth said. “We have filed several different times to get his death certificate corrected.”
The lawsuit also claims the second autopsy report found injuries to Kendrick’s internal organs and includes a photo of his organs stored inside a biohazard bag, which his parents said is suddenly no where to be found.
“They want to just dismiss evidence of what happened to Kendrick, and we will not allow them to do that,” said the teen’s father.
From the Miami Herald:
The new evidence obtained by the Johnsons in the last several months, according to the lawsuit, includes includes a photo from his autopsy performed by a state medical examiner with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who ruled Kendrick died of “accidental positional asphyxiation” — a conclusion his parents say is false.
According to the lawsuit, photos from the initial autopsy show Kendrick’s internal organs were “severely injured.” This contradicts the GBI medical examiner’s report that noted he had no major injuries, the complaint says.
Images of Kendrick’s body at his high school indicate he was stomped on “with extreme force,” according to the complaint.
Photos show “highly visible tread marks from the bottom of a shoe on Kendrick’s abdomen,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit challenges what it describes as a “scientifically and physically impossible narrative” that Kendrick “died from a freak accident during school hours,” however, the GBI continues to stand by the original ruling of the bureau’s chief medical examiner.
“GBI Medical Examiner’s Office conducted a thorough autopsy on this case,” GBI public affairs director Sara Lue told the Herald last week. “The case is closed, and we stand behind our original findings.”
In January, Kendrick’s family filed a $1 billion federal lawsuit against several law enforcement agencies involved in Kendrick’s case, including the Lowndes County Medical Examiner, the sheriff’s office, and the GBI, accusing the agencies of covering up what the family believes to be the teen’s murder. According to WMGT, the family also filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Lowndes County Board of Education, claiming Kendrick had been repeatedly attacked and harassed by a white student, and that another student at the school “had a history of provoking and attacking” the Black teen.
“If Kendrick was white, his family wouldn’t be going through this right now,” his father said. “But since it’s a Black child, these people don’t care. But we care. And we will push for the truth. And we will push for everything to be right.”
Yeah — we all still care.
Black people across social media have, for years, refused to let Kendrick Johnson’s story go. He didn’t up and die out of thin air, and he certainly didn’t roll himself up in a gym mat after he died.
His death continues to go unexplained and swept under the proverbial rug as an accident no one is responsible for.
We still aren’t buying it, and we hope his family receives all the answers and every bit of the justice they deserve.
