The case of Kendrick Johnson Crime Scene Photo involves race, so no explanation can quell the endless accusations by some, including the required claims that it was a modern lynching. Much of the public and media nodded in agreement with this notion. After all, this is the South. Terrible things are happening here.
A recent documentary, “Finding Kendrick Johnson,” narrated by the actress who plays the grandmother in the hit “Black-ish” series, explores this vein and delves into the conspiracy and horror of lynching.
In 2013, authorities determined that Johnson got stuck in the carpet and suffocated while trying to retrieve a slipper. The Lowndes Sheriff’s Department (Paulk was not a sheriff at the time) and the GBI came to this conclusion early on.
Rallies were followed on who killed KJ by malicious charges that KJ had been killed by a bludgeon by Brian and Branden Bell, the son of local FBI agent Rick Bell. The bereaved family sued for $100 million in 2015, claiming that the former sheriff, the school’s administration, and an FBI agent were responsible for placing the body on the gym floor mat. To disguise it as an accident. Cheyenne King, the Johnsons’ attorney, later called the insane claim a “typo”, meaning John Does hide the bony in the carpet.
That lawsuit collapsed, and a judge ordered the Johnsons and Kings to pay $292,000 to cover the defendants’ attorneys’ fees. Ebony magazine later agreed to pay Bell $500,000 following a $5 million defamation lawsuit.
Paulk, a white Democrat, was sheriff years ago and won re-election in 2016. He promised to review the controversial case. It took a while to get all 17 boxes of files. Then, he said, he and two other investigators investigated the case for 13 months before reaching his conclusions last month.
All of the testimony, interviews, grand jury testimony, and even some interrogators’ evident coercion and intimidation, he claimed, “do nothing to indicate foul play by anyone that resulted to KJ’s murder.”
School video cameras and other evidence showed Johnson entering the gym at the same time as a Bell brother was on the other side of the sprawling school and another on a school bus heading to Mason.
Johnson’s body underwent three autopsies, including one at the request of the family. This determined the cause of death to be “fracture trauma”. During this autopsy, the pathologist discovered that Johnson’s organs, which had been removed during the first, were missing. This has filled interminable and wild theory.
Paulk couldn’t determine what happened to the organs, but believes the GBI got rid of them due to “advanced decomposition.”
He then targeted Michael Moore, the former central Georgia federal prosecutor whose investigation ultimately led to an armored car and teams of heavily armed federal agents swearing at Bell’s home in a morning raid in 2015.
After three years of investigation, federal authorities dropped the case, saying they could not prove a crime had been committed.
In an interview, Paulk said Moore told FBI agents who wanted to drop the case, “I’m going to move on. I’m going to get famous because of this.
Paulk also said Moore “spoke to Ebony Magazine” and that the affidavits to obtain search warrants from the judges “contained glaring errors.”
Moore declined to respond to Paulk’s allegations, saying: “The only instruction we received was to review the evidence and follow where it leads. Anytime you have the unexplained death of a young person and there are conflicting reports, it’s the job of the Police to look at those things.
Kenneth Johnson, the teen’s father, told me that Paulk could not have delved into the records to reach the conclusions he did.
“They never would have broken into their house if (the Bells) had nothing to do with it,” said that and that the feds did not clear the Bells, Simply put, they were unable to establish that a crime had been committed.