Kendrick Johnson Was Killed At School

Kendrick Johnson, a seventeen year old Lowndes County Georgia student,  didn't come home from school one day in January of this year. He didn't make it to a basketball game, either. On January 11, he was found deceased, rolled up in a gym mat. The death was ruled an accident, and some truly insane speculations were made concerning how he got into the gym mat. No evidence was analyzed, no witnesses were interviewed, the crime scene wasn't even taped off; Kendrick was found shortly after ten in the morning, and police did not investigate the surroundings or begin to look for evidence until after three in the afternoon, even though Georgia law requires that the coroner be called immediately when police discover a body. During the five hour interim, the gymnasium was in use. It would seem that police already somehow "knew" the death was an "accident".

That's exactly how Bill Watson, the Lowndes County coroner, ruled Kendrick's death: as an accident. A second autopsy was done at his parents' request and expense, and that autopsy yielded different findings. Kendrick Johnson actually died of "unexplained, apparent non-accidental blunt force trauma"....CNN, quoting the medical report. Kendrick's parents were also told by the sheriff and the prosecuting attorney that Kendrick was alone in the gym when he died. Yet the surveillance taken on that day shows other students in the gym at the same time. In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, L. Warren Turner, Jr., the attorney for the school, told Anderson Cooper that there were other students present in the gym. The very same attorney had previously joined the Georgia Bureau of Investigations in an unsuccessful effort to convince the community that Kendrick was alone when he died. The information is obviously conflicting, yet the lawyer does not acknowledge the problem. Rather than admit wrongdoing on the part of the school, which owes it's students better and more competent supervision, he leaves Kendrick's parents with the task of paying their own lawyer to challenge him, even though he knows that in protecting the school, he is at cross purposes with student safety, perverting justice, allowing a killer to remain at large, and sending a clear message to any would-be bullies that the school is more concerned with protecting it's public image than protecting any underage crime victims.

Anderson Cooper has as much of the footage from the day Kendrick died as he was able to get from the school. The reader should also note that law enforcement did not even peruse this video before the death was initially ruled accidental. Had Kendrick been white, would this investigation have been handled differently?

 

The Lowndes County coroner, Bill Watson, made yet another interesting comment. In addition to getting away with covering for a school where homicides go uninvestigated and covering for a police department that has agendas that are more important to the local sheriff than impartial enforcement of the law, Watson wants Anderson Cooper to redact the whole interview between himself and Cooper! Fat chance! Watson may be able to manipulate the journalists and advertisers who produce the local news where he lives, but he does not own Anderson Cooper or CNN!