FILE- In this Dec. 13, 2013 file photo, Kenneth and Jacquelyn Johnson stand next to a banner on their SUV showing their late son, Kendrick Johnson in Valdosta, Ga. A Georgia sheriff said Wednesday, March 10, 2021, he's reopened an investigation into the 2013 death of the teenager, whose body was found inside a rolled-up gym mat at his high school. (AP Photo/Russ Bynum, File)
A Georgia sheriff says he’s reopened an investigation into the 2013 death of a teenager whose body was found inside a rolled-up gym mat at his high school.
Lowndes County Sheriff Ashley Paulk said Wednesday he is personally leading a new examination of the death of 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson of Valdosta after the U.S. Justice Department gave the sheriff’s office 17 boxes of evidence it collected in its own investigation that ended in 2016.
We are aware of the current situation regarding Jay “Sinatraa” Won and have launched an investigation internally. While the investigation is pending, he is suspended from the team.
We will provide a further update once the investigation has concluded.
Federal authorities never brought charges in the case and state and local investigators concluded years earlier that Johnson died in a freak accident.
His parents have long insisted he was slain.
Family spokesman Marcus Coleman said Johnson’s parents are grateful the case getting a fresh start.
“Sometimes he’d pretend to be OK with my excuses but then he’d ask just for me to kiss him and I’d say okay and then he just did more and more until we had sex anyways,” Hernandez writes. “I’d try and say no again and he’d just push himself on me anyway.”
“Eventually, I would rather just say yes and lay there until he was done than fight him on the no. [On one occasion] he wanted to have sex, I didn’t have an excuse for why I didn’t want to at the time, so I just let it happen and laid there and stared at the ceiling with him on top of me, his weight crushing my chest. I think about staring up at that ceiling every day.”
