After a Teen Was Found Dead in a Gym Mat, Police Said He Accidentally Suffocated, But His Family Suspects Foul Play

In Southern Georgia, where Confederate flags and monuments are still prominently displayed, a Black high school sophomore was found dead in his school’s old gym in 2013. 

Authorities called it a tragic accident. The young man’s parents believe he was murdered by white classmates. The community, tainted by its history of slavery and Jim Crow, remains divided mostly along racial lines.

Fifteen-year-old Kendrick Johnson was an academically average student at Lowndes High in Valdosta, Ga., but excelled in sports. He played football and basketball. When he wasn’t kicking or dribbling a ball, he ran track. 

On January 10, 2013, Johnson headed to the old gym. He was not seen exiting it. His mother Jacquelyn reported him missing around midnight, according to an incident report viewed by A&E Crime + Investigation. The following morning, a student noticed feet sticking out of one of the rolled-up gym mats. A coach and several students moved the other mats surrounding it. When the mat in question toppled over, the group discovered that the feet were attached to a corpse. 

Jacquelyn drove to the school to inquire about her son. She asked one official on the scene if the body in the gym was her son. She received the confirmation she didn’t want to hear. That afternoon, Sheriff Chris Prine announced that Kendrick likely wedged into the rolled mat in an attempt to fetch his shoes, which is where students would often store them. The theory goes that he got stuck in the mat and suffocated. Prine said his death “appeared to be accidental.”

Kendrick’s family does not believe his death was accidental. Aside from the incredulity of such a freakish accident, they didn’t understand how his face had gotten so bruised and swollen. 

Valdosta also never quite shed its reputation as a den of systemic racism. In the center of town, next to the Lowndes County Courthouse Square, serves as a daily reminder of the city’s past: A monument of a Confederate soldier erected in 1911 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. 

“There is a long racist history in Valdosta that largely gets ignored for convenience's sake,” Valdosta State University history and Africana studies professor Thomas Aiello tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Most of our counties around south Georgia still have their monuments. They have made the argument that taking down the monument is erasing history.” 

That history includes a May 1918 event in which Black farm worker Sidney Johnson allegedly shot and killed white planter Hampton Smith, who had a reputation for abusing his Black employees. Johnson hid in Valdosta. He was found, along with his supposed accomplices. White mobs lynched at least 11 people. After Johnson was shot dead, he was dragged by a vehicle and then set on fire. None of the participants ever faced justice. In fact, the police often worked hand-in-glove with the mobs, and as many as 458 people were killed in Georgia in acts related to mob violence between 1882 and 1930.

“The Black population here is going to automatically assume that there is something nefarious if they’re not being communicated with fairly and if there aren’t channels opened to explain what’s going on at all times,” Aiello says.

So when Kendrick’s family held a press conference on January 13, 2013 claiming that the investigation was a cover-up, their claim resonated with the Black community. Then-president of the local chapter of NAACP Leigh Touchton got involved. “History of race and police brutality in the South, as well as killings of Black men in police custody elsewhere in our nation creates massive distrust even to this day,” she tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “The nation had just collectively experienced the killing of Trayvon Martin, and the Johnson family hired Ben Crump, who represented Trayvon’s parents.”

On February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Martin was returning from a nearby convenience store to his father’s fiancée’s home in Sanford, Fla., when neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman approached him. The confrontation ended with Zimmerman fatally shooting Martin. He claimed self-defense and was acquitted.  

The autopsy conducted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) listed Kendrick’s cause of death as accidental positional asphyxia. 

Dubious of the findings, Kendrick’s family had the body exhumed to perform an independent autopsy in June 2013. The second examination concluded that he died from blunt force trauma and not by accident. A third autopsy, performed by the Office of Armed Forces Medical Examiner in August 2014, listed the cause of death as positional asphyxia and the manner as accidental. An amended report two years later stated the cause and manner of death as undetermined.

The Johnsons also got the FBI involved. The Department of Justice and the FBI investigated the murder and determined that there was not enough evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that someone had killed Kendrick. The DOJ closed the case in June 2016.

The Johnsons filed a lawsuit in 2014 against school board members and classmates for negligence, denial of equal protection and discrimination based on race. A few months later, the family filed a wrongful death suit against dozens of officials. The suit also named two of Kendrick’s white classmates and their father. The complaint alleged the school mates, who are brothers, assaulted Kendrick in the gym and their father, a local FBI agent, helped cover it up. The judge accused the Johnsons and their attorney of fabricating evidence to support their claims. Both cases were dismissed. 

The Johnson family did not respond to A&E Crime + Investigation’s request for comment. 

Public scrutiny of the case led to Lowndes County Sheriff to re-open the investigation in 2021. In January 2022, the sheriff’s office concluded that Kendrick’s death was an accident and no charges would be filed. The next year, the Johnsons filed a $1 billion lawsuit against the GBI and Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office about what they claimed was “false information" about the investigation into Kendrick’s death.

Touchton initially supported the Johnsons. But between the GBI autopsy and investigations conducted by the DOJ with FBI agents, the Valdosta NAACP and the Valdosta Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she concluded that no crime was committed, “Yet the Johnson family continues to claim murder,” she says. “I have never seen a grieving family behave this way.”

Aiello had Kendrick’s cousin in his class at the time of the investigation, which gave him a closer look at how the case unfolded.  “While the investigation might have been pristine, because it was so closed and because they were not willing to communicate everything with the public, the assumption of the Black community is always going to be that we are being given short shrift,” Aiello says.

Ultimately, Aiello is not ready to believe the official account of Kendrick’s death: “We have a regular history in the South of finding Black death accidental.”