CNN reports that this past weekend, federal authorities looking into the January death of Valdosta, Georgia teenager Kendrick Johnson seized the hard drives from the video surveillance system at Lowndes County High School. For those who don't know, local investigators stand by their initial determination that Kendrick fell inside a gym mat and suffocated. However, his family paid for an independent autopsy which suggested he'd actually been beaten to death. The pathologist who conducted this second probe also found that some of Kendrick's organs had been removed. When Kendrick's family watched video released by a court order earlier this month, they claimed its quality was suspiciously low; it was very erratic and blurry--leading them to suspect it had been tampered with. Apparently now investigators want to find out for sure if the video was altered.
U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia Michael Moore issued a grand jury subpoena to seize the hard drives, the source said.
Kendrick Johnson's family waited months for hundreds of hours of surveillance video, hoping it would yield answers about their son's January death, but they were disappointed to learn that the four cameras inside the Valdosta, Georgia, gymnasium showed only a few collective seconds of Johnson, jogging. The camera fixed on the gym mats was blurry.
The Johnsons' attorneys were not shy in stating their suspicion that someone could have tampered with the videos.
Attorney Chevene King has questioned why time codes weren't shown in the videos.
"We don't have any time code with which to synchronize the events that are shown in the video. ... Either the cameras did this on their own or a human being interacted to make these cameras do these things," King said.
Last month, CNN took a copy of already-released video to forensic video analyst and FBI National Academy instructor Grant Fredericks. While Fredericks doesn't think the video was altered, he did determine that
at least an hour of footage was missing, and the files provided ere not original footage. That's highly suspicious, to say the least, considering that Lowndes County sheriff's investigators allowed school district officials to determine what information should be turned over in the initial probe.
There's a lot about this whole story that screams cover-up. The medical examiner found that he'd suffocated after falling into the mat. However, EMTs who examined Kendrick's body found evidence of blunt-force trauma to the neck, but it wasn't mentioned in the state examiner's report. The pathologist hired by the Johnsons suspects that it's more likely that Kendrick actually died from a blow to the neck. When former FBI investigator Harold Copus looked at the video and several pictures of the scene, he determined that Kendrick had been murdered. And as I mentioned earlier, Kendrick's organs had been removed and the cavities stuffed with newspaper.
One can hope that Kendrick's family can get some answers as 2014 dawns--and that if there was a cover-up, everyone, and I mean everyone, involved goes to jail.