Sheriff reopens case into teenager found dead in gym mat

When Kendrick Johnson of Valdosta, Georgia, didn’t come home the night of Jan. 10, 2013, his family called the police.

The next morning, students at Lowndes High School found Kendrick’s body head down and wedged inside a heavy gym mat in the school’s gymnasium. Within months, the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office concluded the death was an accident: Kendrick had suffocated after he became stuck in the mat, trying to retrieve a shoe that had fallen inside.

His parents, however, said they believed their son, a popular athlete at the school and, at 17, the youngest of five siblings, had been murdered. For years, they pleaded with local and federal authorities to reexamine the case.

Last Friday, the current Lowndes County sheriff, Ashley Paulk, who was not in office when a previous sheriff had concluded that the death was accidental, decided that his office would reopen the case, which continues to confound residents of Valdosta, a city of about 56,000 in southern Georgia, eight years on.

“I’ve never told anybody what I believe about this case, whether it was accidental or murder,” Paulk said on Wednesday. “I would never say that until I could see all the evidence.”

He added: “If it was an accident, it’s a very, very unusual way for something to happen.”

Kendrick’s father, Kenneth Johnson, said he would not feel any relief or closure until there had been an arrest in his son’s case.

“I’m hoping the truth comes out — the truth that we already know,” Kenneth Johnson said. “My son was murdered.”

The decision came after county and federal investigations, and multiple federal lawsuits filed by Kendrick Johnson’s parents, who had accused the Lowndes County School Board, the Sheriff’s Office and the father of two boys who they believed were responsible for their son’s death of conspiring to hide the circumstances.

The lawsuits, none of which were successful in civil court, said that Kendrick had gotten into a fight with two boys just before he died. One of the boys had threatened Kendrick, telling him, “It ain’t over,” according to the complaints. The boys were never charged.

In May 2013, the medical examiner at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation issued an autopsy report that determined the cause of death was “positional asphyxia,” suggesting that Kendrick had become trapped upside-down in the rolled-up mat and suffocated.

The report prompted the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office to close its investigation.