Kendrick Johnson: Found In a Gym Mat!? SKETCHY CASE

[Music] hey guys welcome back to my channel and welcome to another true crime video this one is so sketchy oh my god this is about to be a journey you guys I have been wanting to make a video on this for so long there's so much controversy involved in this case there are so many different opinions there's a lot of fighting online about it so it's almost a little nervous to even dip my toes in this one but I tried to stay as unbiased as I could for this one and I just want to know your guys's thoughts on it because at the end of the day I have no idea I don't feel like I have any solid opinion on what I think happened so I am super interested in hearing his opinions on this one but let's get right into it today we were talking about Kendrick Johnson this is Kendrick Johnson he was a 17 year old boy from Valdosta Georgia and Kendricks family described him as a quiet boy who loves sport and also played on the high school football team he was pretty good and he had high hopes to play college football once he graduated high school it was fun he was a athlete he was a jokester he was the life of our house he was the left of our house he was the joy of our house and he gives us strength to keep fight our story takes place in Lowndes County Georgia at Lowndes high school but all of his plans for life after graduation were ruined when Kendrick was found in a rustling man rolled up in a wrestling mat On January 11 2013 dead so that night he was supposed to be watching some type of sports event at school and was supposed to be coming home right after that but at 10 p.m. his mother Jackie realized that Kendrick had not made it home from school that day and she had been worried for a little while but you know was hoping he would show up so she decided to drive directly to the school drive around the school see if he was walking around or hanging out with friends nearby or something but by the time midnight came and she'd been looking for awhile she found no trace of him had no idea where he was and that is when she called the police and reported him a missing person the next morning on a January 11th she went to the school and along with the school made missing persons flyers and put them up around the school but then around 10:30 a.m. a group of the high schoolers were in the gym and they noticed some socks sticking out of one of the rolled-up wrestling mat at first they thought it was a joke they didn't think it was real but as they got closer they realized that there really was a body in this mat and when they took the mat down which they didn't really know it was a crime scene at this point but that kind of sucks that they moved his body he noticed a strong scent of vomit blood and probably the smell of a decomposing body and that's when they realized that it was a dead body inside of the mat so obviously they freaked out the school went on lockdown and the police were called right away Jackie was actually in the school at this time and heard through the school that her son was found in the gym rolled up in a wrestling match I cannot imagine how you would feel now let me tell you a little bit more about how they found him although I want to point out there are tons of video and pictures of Kendricks body it was not in good condition it is a little frightening and I don't ever regardless of what they look like I don't ever put in pictures of dead bodies in my videos I just not what I do I don't think it's respectful to the victim but obviously some of you guys are gonna be curious know from a criminal standpoint and you're gonna want to see the pictures so you can easily find those Kendrick Johnson photos like they'll come up trust me i think when you google Kendrick Johnson they come up like right away but there's a couple of different photos there's photo out there that is after the autopsy that looks really bad there's a photo of him when he was first found that one looks bad too but not as bad but people are always confused and think that the one that his post autopsy is the way that they found in which it's not so I just want to clarify so he was found upside down in an inverted position in a wrestling mat that was like sitting up on its side vertical this particular gym was where they were storing a bunch of wrestling mats and a lot of the boys actually didn't have lockers so they would store their stuff in these little rolled-up mats as well known that these mats were there but he's in the mat upside down facing down right and his hands were up facing up behind him and his feet you know were towards the top another huge part of this case is the surveillance video and I'll get more into this more in depth but this surveillance video is kind of just weird I have a lot of questions about it but I don't know if it was necessarily it tampered with I'm not sure 1:00 p.m. the surveillance video showed him entering the gym by himself and he was marked absent from his following class so that was probably the last footage of him the same room that they found Kendrick they found two pairs of shoes and a schoolbook one pair was inside the mat next to his legs the other pair was split up one of the shoes was outside of the mat and one of the shoes was in the mat under his head the Lowndes County Sheriff's Department ran an autopsy this was done by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and they came back very quickly with the finding that Kendrick had died from suffocation the sheriff basically said that Kendricks death was nothing more than a tragic accident the Sheriff's Department said that he was wandering around this area climbing on these mats to try to get his shoes and then he fell in one of them I'm not sure if they meant he was reaching in after a shoe or that he was finding a shoe near it and was holding it and like fell in but it seems like a very odd fall especially because the width of the wrestling mat wasn't even as wide as his shoulders I don't remember the exact dimensions but it's just weird it doesn't match up very well if you do look up his face and body doesn't look like suffocation that's not what you would immediately think but sometimes bodies look really weird it's just true especially a body that has been upside down so the main thing here is that Kendricks body his his head was really like bloated because it was filled with blood he was upside down and they believed that he was upside down for 21 hours so imagine how much blood would be in the front part of your body but what I don't understand is if he was going in there like if he dropped his shoe in there and he was trying to get the shoe what did his arm be out like in front of him his arms were tucked back behind him so I'm not sure that just sounds really really odd to me but his body looked horrible and scary and shocking for the parents and as you can imagine they did not like the answer that he just suffocated which if I were the parent I would not like that answer either maybe he suffocated but maybe he did it and it it's worth a second look at things for sure day after Kendrick was found Reverend Floyd Rose the Valdosta Southern Christian Leadership Conference was approached by a Johnson family member and asked to run an independent investigation into Kendricks death he agreed to help and from that point on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has been helping his family with the case in April 2013 during a public rally the Johnson family held hands and actually blocked the way the Lowndes County Courthouse in protest and they were arrested for civil disobedience and reverend rose put up his own home as collateral to bail his mom out of jail so he really really cared about them wanted to help them and they felt like they weren't being listened to for the first time that we talked to the chef and when he came to his cockamamie story of how they found kids so right there from the beginning we have no no reason to trust them at all but the concession they didn't show us no justice but in May of 2013 Johnson's held a fundraising event I was hosted by civil rights activist al Sharpton who is a huge name in the political world I guess and it was a really big deal that he came out and he was there supporting them al even gave them five hundred dollars of his own money five thousand dollars was raised and people were at least led to believe that this was going to be going towards reward money however we're not sure what this money went to the family never set up the reward themselves instead local businessman Roy Taylor gave Redmond Rhodes ten thousand dollars to use as the reward money the Johnson family arranged for Kendricks body to be exhumed or dug up from the ground for a second autopsy and this is when they hired a private pathologist dr. William Anderson and he made several new discoveries about Kendricks body now this case has so many conspiracies tied with it so many theories and that is probably because of this neck finding pathologist found that every single organ inside of Kendricks body was removed and replaced with crumpled up newspaper now the people who first processed his body was the Harrington of funeral home in Valdosta Georgia and they process the body after it was initially done by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation the funeral home said that they never actually received the organs with his body and the funeral home owner said that he you know wasn't involved but whoever did the autopsy probably realized that his organs were destroyed you know through the natural process of the body deteriorating although it hadn't been that long they found him 21 hours later and would have made an impact on the body especially being upside down but enough for them to just throw them out and that's what the funeral home director claims happened he said that whoever did the autopsy had the coroner decided to throw the organs out and that it's normal to do that and the funeral home is actually the one who stuffed the body and that's actually not sketchy at all I know it sounds really weird but that's actually somewhat common I'd love to know if you if you know anyone or you work in a funeral home what do you think about this because I've seen conflicting stuff online but I guess this was kind of an older thing that was done in like the 70s but they eventually kind of stopped doing it so it's a little odd but it's a way to save money so I have no idea but it is not unheard of to stuff a body to give him more shape at the funeral home and the Georgia Secretary of State office did an investigation on the funeral home and they did not find them guilty of any wrongdoing although they did admit it's a little insensitive and odd and cheap pretty much for a funeral home to be using newspaper there's other materials that could have been used cotton ball something but what is really interesting about it and I could not confirm this but I found in multiple places that they actually did this for free or pretty much free as just to help the Johnson family so they might have been using newspaper because they didn't charge them for it so they would like the cheapest possible way but another key discovery that the pathologist made was that there was some type of blunt-force trauma to the back of Kendricks head on his neck he claims that suffocation would not leave this type of a mark I want to point out that it was a very small bruise actually less than an inch I don't think it's enough to say that that is the cause of death but I'm not an expert but this has been widely debated is it possible Kendrick Johnson's death was a homicide no it is not I stake my reputation on the findings that the doctors in my office find every single day the family commissioned an independent review you reviewed the review oh yes the review is woefully inadequate report is really inconclusive it simply states that the death was consistent with blood trauma of the neck without any elaboration subsequently and television interviews the pathologist has stated that the supposed bruise that he found on the right side of the Johnson young man's neck was between two and three centimeters which is about three-quarters of an inch that's the only supposed injury that he found and he postulates that the cause of death was a blow to the side of the neck that struck a point where the arteries in the neck split and that this caused his heart to stop this mechanism of death this cause of death never been described in the scientific literature ever it does not exist what do you believe happened I believe that Kendrick lost a shoe that fell down in the center of this mat and the hole clearly was big enough for him to get into and he tried to go in after it and because the size of the hole was relatively small I believe it was measure of 17 inches he went in headfirst with his arms extended and he slipped down and was trapped there and once he was trapped there he could not get out a freak accident oh yes that's a freak accident and deaths like this are rare but they occur and any experienced forensic pathologist has seen deaths very similar to this over the course of their careers on July 28th of 2014 the Johnson family finally filed wrongful death lawsuit against the Lowndes County Board of Education and it's superintendent and the principal and their lawsuit basically claimed that Kendrick did not just fall into a mat and suffocate he was actually attacked and injured in some way and then put into the mat and the lawsuit really pushed that there was a racist motive behind it and the lawsuit also specifically talked about one kid who they report had bullied Kendrick in the past tacking him even in front of coaches and teachers his mother actually did complain about this student to the school and nothing ever came of it like this was way before and the lawsuit also claims that the school did not have enough good cameras or the cameras weren't working well enough to ensure safety for all of the students there's boy did they're referring to is named Brandon bail and he's a wrestler and this is Brian Bell who is Brandon's a younger brother and former classmate of Kendrick now Rick bell their father is an FBI agent which has definitely stirred the conspiracy pop more some other claims that Kendrick had talked about these two boys being mean to him harassing him at school that it had been happening for a while I'm gonna ask my photographer to push in tight on your face okay our viewers can read your expression did you have anything to do the death of Kendrick Johnson he's like one of my good friends even at the time of his death I mean that time is dead and there's a magazine called evany magazine and they published a series of articles hinting that Bryan and Brandon were responsible for Kendricks death even though the magazine didn't mention their name specifically the description of them and everything just add up and it was obviously about them so in August of 2014 their parents filed a five million dollar lawsuit and yes evany magazine says they claimed that Brandon and Bryan were being harassed and bullied by other people because of the article and because Kendricks mother had talked about how those two boys had harassed her son and those two boys also refused to help in the investigation at all maybe this is just because their dad's name VI agent he's like never helped in anything I don't know but they were not willing to cooperate in the investigation which makes them very sketchy soon became possible suspect jumping ahead a bit here but just a side note Brandon Bell actually got a really good scholarship to be on the Florida State University football team as a linebacker and a year later after that his scholarship was revoked because of all this they were afraid they would get scrutiny for handing a potential murderer a scholarship so that's why this is so hard because these kids lives have been affected it's possible they were involved it's possible that they were not every word we broadcast of this it's gonna be scrutinized by the blogosphere the Twittersphere and so on yes sir it should be and I want everybody to know the truth I mean they can ridicule me and they can they can say whatever they want but in the end the truth will prevail and everybody will find that me and my brother have been innocent and always will be innocent are you more convinced today than ever that KJ was the victim of foul play yes and with some of what the bells say no they weren't friends and in a lawsuit Johnson's parents allege a group including the Bell brothers sons of an FBI agent violently assaulted their son leading to his death my object is to only get justice for my son he prayed for the Johnsons yes sir I have I hope that they found justice and I hope that they do find out the truth about their son to come out about where but in my phone it's important that people try not to be biased that people are innocent until proven guilty and oftentimes this doesn't happen especially with this case like there's so much bias reporting on this case it is unbelievable this also reminds me of that can you get Jenkins case the amount of false information that was spread about kanika Jenkins and what happened is insanity like so much fake [ __ ] was on the internet people are making memes like reposting stuff on Instagram it got so out of hand so that's why it's important to never just believe one thing you know look at a bunch of different resources you know different biases different sides of things and then come to your own conclusion in the root of 2015 Kendrick Johnson's family filed a 100 million dollar lawsuit and this lawsuit actually said that Rick the boy's father ordered his two sons to kill Kendrick Johnson claimed that his death was not an accident it was a murder in the lounge county attorney Jim Elliott stated that the allegations are unfounded and baseless and that any response will be made in court and it really is pretty baseless like there's not proof sorry there's just not even if something kind of makes sense or it could have happened doesn't that there's proof for it in November of 2015 the Department of Justice filed a motion to stay in the case in a stay of proceedings is a ruling by the court I would stop further legal process in a trial or other legal proceedings but this was denied and then quickly after that Jackie Hendricks mother dismissed the lawsuit and they canceled it because they were actually hoping to wait until the Department of Justice ran their own investigation to see what happened with that and then they were going to refile but because Jackie and Kenneth Johnson his parents dragged in all these other people accused people of things and then dismissed their own lawsuit they were sued for more than $850,000 for attorneys fees and a million dollars for defamation damages and on June 20th of 2016 the Department of Justice finished up their work they announced that they would not file any criminal charges relating to Kendrick Johnson's death in August 10th of 2017 a judge ordered that the Johnson family must pay more than two hundred ninety two thousand dollars in attorneys fees to the dozens of people they ended up accusing of wrongdoing in their lawsuit and this was about the time that people found out that the picture of Kendrick that looks like really [ __ ] up like he looked messed up for sure when they first found it but the picture that they were using on posters like the family used this picture everywhere they were holding it up on a giant signs and stuff that was after his body was autopsy so obviously it's gonna look different so that really hurt their credibility as well and unless people start supporting them in this case so going back a little bit here to 2014 at this point it was already kind of rumored that there was beef between them because of a girl a girlfriend or the same love interest or Kendrick had slept with someone I'm not saying exactly what happened because I don't know exactly what happened at the time of Kendricks death Brandon bail was actually on his way to a wrestling tournament you know that it happened sometime after like one ish tournament started at four therefore the bus had to have left at 12:30 there was some sketch [ __ ] that went on at the crime scene the law enforcement agency did not ever tape off the crime scene with the crime scene tape they also straight-up failed to wear protective coverings over their feet they were just walking around with their shoes how they were there's even pictures that they took showing their shoes in the picture I mean if anything is just shitty police work and I mentioned this earlier but their whole theory about Hendrick falling in didn't make a lot of sense because the width of the wrestling mat was 14 inches when it was rolled up and his shoulders were 19 inches wide and what's also really hot about this is if he had fallen into the mat wouldn't someone have heard him screaming for help like I feel like if we were stuck like that and you could feel the blood rushing to your head and you were conscious you'd be screaming and then at the scene there was another pair of shoes and a hoodie near the area and it was never collected as evidence Kendricks parents agreed that they did not belong to him so why wouldn't they have been collected as evidence that doesn't make a lot of sense how about the shoes that were on top of him in the mat I mean he couldn't have sent them up he was in the mat so they must have been added after he was in there it's also really weird is there was dried blood on the wall near where Kendricks body was found and this is so sketch but the blood was dismissed because they determined it wasn't Kendricks wasn't part of the scene but they never figured out whose blood it was I mean wouldn't you want to follow every single possibility wouldn't you want to look into something like blood it's basically a fingerprint to find out who someone is I mean it's so so important to test blood seems very hard to just dismiss and there's little things like that that definitely make people like look twice at the police department involved in this and is like what the [ __ ] you guys doing now CNN decided to interview Chris pride they really really went after this case and here's their interview Victor Blackwell CNN the Sheriff's Department has denied a cover-up but we took the Johnson's concerns to Lowndes County Sheriff Chris prime got some questions about the Kendrick Johnson case why not sir I called our case the family has some concerns about why some things were not taken into evidence there was blood on the wall acacia with you and what why is that because I don't then less than a minute after he'd invited us in he showed us out well obviously he was not happy to be talking about this case and another weird thing that happened is it wasn't until six hours after the police had found Kendricks body that they called the coroner to let them know that he had died but the most important thing I think is the surveillance footage CNN had someone look at these tapes check out what they found CNN has hired Grant Frederick's and his team at forensic video solutions to analyze the hundreds of hours of surveillance from Lowndes high school although he does not believe that jumpy video is the result of editing he says there are some other major problems those files are not original files they're not something that an investigator should rely on for the truth they've been altered in a number of ways primarily in image quality and likely in dropped information information loss there are also a number of files that are corrupted because they've not got processed correctly and they're not playable I can't say why they were done that way but they were not done correctly and they were not done thoroughly so we're missing it and after hours of analysis Frederick's questions whether Lowndes County Schools provided all of the surveillance video from the old gym to investigators there is a hole of time where none of the cameras provide any record that that I've been provided Frederick's has all the camera angles and all the video released by the Lowndes County Sheriff's Office for cameras in the gym that records motion from when the lights turn on in the morning until when the lights are turned off at night the moments before Kendrick Johnson enters the gym look at what happens to the recordings from these four cameras in the gym the time is recorded with the video the first camera captures images from the start of the day until 1204 p.m. then nothing picks up again at 1:09 p.m. there's consistent surveillance from the second camera until 11:05 a.m. then it stops and picks up again more than two hours later at 1:15 p.m. the third camera also drops at 11:05 a.m. it picks up again at 1:16 p.m. from the final camera their surveillance until 1204 p.m. no recording for more than an hour then it picks up again at 1:09 p.m. notice the hall camera timestamp appears to be 10 minutes behind and there's no confirmation either time matches the exact time of day it is the last time his image is captured on video for the next hour there are multiple gaps in the video surveillance in the gym and there's no video showing the initial discovery of a body in the gym the next time we see Kendrick Johnson is the following day when he's being wheeled out of the gym in a body bag so in 2015 Reverend Rose who you know was hugely involved in this case and announced that he no longer thinks Kendrick was murdered now when it comes to my opinion on things I am still I'm in the not so sure category for sure although I don't think that this was a straight-up murder I don't think it was premeditated for sure I don't think it was like a conspiracy with their dad or anything I do think it's weird that they didn't want to be interviewed I think it's really weird that his hand wasn't reaching out in front of him to grab that shoe although you could have you know kind of tucked it back up but in my opinion I feel like it's definitely possible there was some type of altercation or even a prank gone wrong and I've been thinking about this a lot I feel like to get back at someone maybe they didn't want to straight murder him but they were like hey let's put him upside down in this gym man you know it'll be funny maybe they didn't realize that that could kill you easily suffocate all the blood will rush down and you'll die maybe they didn't realize that that would happen because it is hard to believe that he just fell into one of these so I'm definitely in the I don't [ __ ] know category it is so confusing I feel so badly for everyone involved I feel bad for the Johnson family I honestly feel bad for the Bell kids if they weren't involved in it either because no one should be accused of something and told there's enough evidence to show that they did something but most of all I feel sorry for Kendrick that his life was cut so short that he had dreams of playing college football and he never got to do that or get married and have kids or do anything that he may have wanted to do in his life whether this was an accident or some type of foul play or kind of a mix I'm not sure I just think at the end of the day you definitely cannot hold those boys accountable for murder I mean there's just not enough for it to hold up in court their theory doesn't even make enough sense there's just not enough it's a lot of hearsay a lot of rumors I don't know something is weird about that crime scene something that's weird about the way they handled it something's weird about that surveillance footage uh I've so many questions very recently June 20th 2018 Kendricks mother made an announcement via social media that they have decided to dig up his body again for a third autopsy they applied for him to be exhumed and the city signed off on it and the autopsy took place last Friday at the 22nd at 5:00 p.m. his mother says she hates to disturb his resting place but she feels that she has to do this and you know it's so hard looking at this case because as a mother obviously you're gonna have a somewhat biased view of things you're obviously going to want to fight for justice even if it's just a small possibility with not much evidence I send my support to their family I hope they find the answers that are looking for I hope we all find answers for this because this is so so weird I really want to know your guys's thoughts on this I know there's gonna be very differing opinions debate in the comment section and that's fine follow me on Twitter I am going to be following this for updates and I will be updating people there if anything comes out of this next autopsy and stuff but yes that is it for me today guys stay safe and I will talk to you next [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Kendall Rae

Views: 1,420,295

Rating: 4.9313383 out of 5

Keywords: true, story, crime, interesting, kendrick, johnson, documentary, educational

Id: PFglgQZ2cOQ

Length: 27min 59sec (1679 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 28 2018