In 2015, the Johnsons filed a $100 million civil lawsuit against 38 people, including three of their sons classmates, the school, the local crime lab, state and federal officials, five agents of the GBI, an FBI agent, and more. Then, in 2014, Kendrick Johnsons parents filed a wrongful death suit against the schools officials, alleging that Johnson had been harassed by a white student which went neglected by the school, perhaps due to his race. "I'm not sure at this point who did not return the organs to the body, but I know when we got the body, the organs were not there," Anderson said. "[26] After Moore resigned in 2015,[27] the case was transferred to the Northern District of Ohio under U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, "This can happen to any of our kids," said Kenneth Johnson, the teenager's father. U.S. Attorney Michael Moore in Macon has been monitoring the case but has yet to announce whether he'll take any further action. For 11 of my 23 years, I worked cold cases. But the Justice Department found insufficient evidence to support an investigation. The county medical examiner concluded Johnson died of positional asphyxia and deemed his death accidental. Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who helped focus national attention on the 2012 shooting death of Martin by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, said the discovery raises questions about why Johnson's organs went missing and couldn't be examined in the follow-up autopsy the family requested. According to CNN, funeral director Antonio Harrington claimed the 17-year-olds organs were destroyed through [the] natural process due to the position of his body when he died. They also reported that the blood had likely been there for a long time. The death of 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson at the gymnasium of Lowndes High School in Valdosta, in the U.S. on January 11, 2013, was as bizarre as the subsequent findings. This 2018 autopsy concludes that the cause of death was "apparent non . In January of 2013, Kenneth Johnson got a call no parent ever wants to get. The term organ encompasses reed organs and electronic organs but, unless otherwise specified, is usually understood to refer to pipe organs. Both independent autopsy reports determined the 17-year-old died of non-accidental blunt force trauma inconsistent with the positional asphyxia determination made by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Furthermore, a whole hour of footage from the gym was missing, right at the time which would have shed light on what happened that day. [33], On June 20, 2016, the Department of Justice announced that they would not be filing any criminal charges related to Johnson's death, stating, "After extensive investigation into this tragic event, federal investigators determined that there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone or some group of people willfully violated Kendrick Johnson's civil rights or committed any other prosecutable federal crime.
