A federal judge this week dismissed a $1 billion lawsuit filed by the parents of a 17-year-old boy found dead in rolled up wrestling mat in 2013.
U.S. District Judge Sarah Geraghty noted inconsistencies in the initial investigation into Kendrick Johnson’s death, but ultimately kicked the lawsuit out largely over what amounts to technicalities, WAGA reports.
ohnson, 17, was found dead in at the Lowndes County High School gym on January 11, 2013, as CrimeOnline previously reported. The GBI determined Johnson’s death was accidental — despite two independent autopsies finding the teen died of non-accidental blunt force trauma — and the FBI concurred. The sheriff’s office reopened the investigation in March 2021 and reiterated the accidental ruling nearly a year later.
Sheriff Ashley Paulk, who released a synopsis of the case file concurring with the official report, then offered $500,000 of his own money to anyone with evidence that Johnson was murdered. He called the family’s continued press for information a “witch hunt.”
Police say that Johnson crawled into the mat to retrieve a shoe that had fallen into the rolled mat, became stuck, and continued to burrow into the mat until he became completely trapped and died.
The family filed its lawsuit after Paulk’s investigation.
Johnson’s family filed a notice to appeal the ruling, WXIA reported. In a statement issued on Thursday, they called the ruling “unprecedented and unconstitutional.”
The family also said they would file a complaint against Geraghty; they had previously filed a motion for recusal, which she denied.
“If the message is not clear enough, let me make it clear as crystal right now, anyone, regardless of who you are, what position of power and influence you may hold, if you choose the join the murder cover-up scandal of my son Kendrick, you do so at your own peril,” Kenneth Johnson, Kendrick Johnson’s father, said in a statement.
In her ruling, Geraty noted inconsistencies, especially the difference between Johnson’s shoulder width and the size of the opening in the mat, noted by a deputy to be about 5 inches smaller, WAGA said.
Geraty also noted that the coroner had written that “the investigative climate was very poor to worse when I arrived on scene.”
“He reported that law enforcement did not cooperate with him, KJ’s body had been moved, and the sealed body bag had been opened,” she wrote.
And, she said, surveillance video obtained and published by CNN that year which appeared to be altered was outside the two-year statute of limitations.
She dropped the Georgia Bureau of Investigation from the lawsuit because it is immune, and said that Lowndes County had not been properly served when the lawsuit was filed.
She did rule that claims against two news organizations for defamation were insufficient.
“The Court again expresses its concern about the inconsistencies between the various official reports on KJ’s death and Plaintiffs’ allegations,” she wrote.
But, she said, the other issues meant the lawsuit could not go forward.
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[Featured image: Kendrick Johnson/Contributed]
