Nineteen-year-old Kendrick Johnson never came home from Lowndes High School in Valdosta, Georgia on January 10, 2013. His parents notified the local sheriff, and an investigation at the school the following morning led to the tragic discovery of Johnson’s body face down in the middle of a rolled-up wrestling mat inside one of the school’s two gyms. Investigators believed that Johnson had been reaching inside the mat to retrieve one of his tennis shoes and accidentally fell inside and became trapped.
Lead investigator Lt. Stryde Jones said, “We never had credible evidence that indicated this was anything more than an accident.” The coroner performed an autopsy on the body and officially announced that the cause of death was accidental and due to positional asphyxia. A sad, abrupt end to the story, right?
Unfortunately, it was only the beginning. This happened at a high school in rural Georgia, .. conspiracy theories began to run rampant. The most popular theory dreamed involved the two white sons of an FBI agent named Rick Bell.
Brian, the youngest son, and Johnson had briefly scuffled on the team bus after a football game. That changed the narrative from “accidental death” to “two white boys murder a young black man .., and the federal government concealed evidence of the murder because their father was an FBI agent.”
Local civil rights activists took the accusations very seriously and demanded action. Reverend Floyd Rose, the Lowndes County chapter president of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and local NAACP leader Leigh Touchton both demanded a serious and thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding Johnson’s death, and they got one.
FBI investigators pulled surveillance video from 35 different cameras at the school and carefully analyzed the data. Dozens of witnesses were interviewed. Due to eyewitness accounts and video timestamps, by October of 2013 investigators had been able to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Brian Bell was nowhere near when Johnson went inside the gym. He simply could not have murdered Kendrick Johnson even if he’d wanted. Branden Bell wasn’t even in Valdosta; he was on a bus headed to a wrestling meet in Macon when Johnson sadly met his fate. At last, that was the end of it, right?
Wrong. The Johnsons had lost a son. Somebody had to have murdered him; the coroner, the investigators, and everyone else must be lying as part of a vast (probably right-wing) conspiracy to cover up the crime.
Sadly, that was not good enough for the Johnsons. They had not accepted the official cause of death and paid for a second autopsy, which asserted the cause of death was blunt force trauma. The new, competing narrative to the official cause of death was that Kendrick had actually been beaten to death.
The problem was that their two best (and really, the only) “suspects” had been eliminated by video evidence and eyewitness accounts. That and the absolute lack of physical evidence that Kendrick had been physically assaulted. The new theory was that Kendrick had been murdered by a single, expert blow to the head.
So, with only the results of this second, conflicting autopsy to support their claims, the Johnsons accused everyone involved of participating in a massive conspiracy. ... They refused to watch the surveillance videos.
Let’s be honest: when you’re black but the local SCLC and NAACP aren’t on your side, your case must be pretty weak. When Barack Obama and Eric Holder wouldn’t offer their public support, reasonable people might conclude that legal action would be an exercise in futility.
But who needs reasonable people when we have Al Sharpton?
The Johnsons already had attorney Chevene King, Jr. as their legal counsel and soon added the notorious Benjamin Crump, famous for successfully suing The Retreat at Twin Lakes subdivision in the Trayvon Martin case and the city of Ferguson, Missouri in the Michael Brown case. They had the firepower to go after a big settlement from somebody.
Then U.S. Attorney Michael Moore got involved.
William “Boss” Tweed was one of the most notoriously corrupt politicians in American history, believed to have stolen anywhere between $25-$200 million dollars from New York City taxpayers. Shortly after the Civil War ended, his gang of cronies operating out of Tammany Hall controlled the Big Apple with an iron fist, until Thomas Nast’s political cartoons exposing the rampant corruption eventually led to Tweed’s arrest and conviction.
However, Boss Tweed was a piker and a rank amateur when compared to former President Barack Obama., who used the full weight and power of the federal government for his own personal political gain. However, Boss Tweed only controlled the largest city on the East Coast. Obama controlled the entire country for eight years, and the stench of corruption still lingers from his administration, four years later. President Barack Obama’s Department of Injustice appointed attorneys like Michael Moore for the middle district of Georgia.
Brian Bell, one of the teens falsely accused in public of murder but never actually charged with any crime, lost his scholarship offered by the nearby Florida State Seminoles and was lucky to even get the opportunity to play for the Akron Zips.
Here’s where the story not only gets weird, but stupid. Rick Bell, father of the two boys accused of Johnson’s murder, was accused of helping them conceal the crime. Rick was an active FBI agent and about the last person anyone would ever expect of a racially motivated hate crime -- his investigation of the burning of a black church in Arkansas led to the arrest and conviction of three white men for the crime... Moore apparently directed his investigators to operate as if Rick Bell was a criminal mastermind behind the mother of all conspiracy theories, not an honest FBI field agent with a known and respected track record.
The FBI announced they were closing the case, which outraged Moore, who suggested that Attorney General Eric Holder should be making the final decision. However, SAC Johnson curtly replied, “I work for FBI Director Comey and we are closing this case. Period. We will not take part in this witch hunt any longer.”
... the Bell family woke up to discover a 25-member SWAT team banging on their front door and an armored personnel carrier parked on their street. It was only one of six early morning raids by U.S Marshals working for Michael Moore, allegedly looking for evidence of Johnson’s murder.
Don’t those Gestapo tactics sound familiar? When pre-dawn raids by overwhelming numbers of heavily armed police officers swarmed the personal residences of guys like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone,
Former federal prosecutor Tom Withers commented, “This is an egregious miscarriage of justice. It’s shocking that this case would go forward after the FBI concluded these kids were not involved. It’s just unbelievable.”
The full weight and power of the federal government was being brought to bear against a dedicated, completely innocent public servant and his family. Facts didn’t matter. Ron Hosko, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, wrote in a scathing letter to the Valdosta Daily Times, “Moore’s investigation began with nothing more than rumor and the politics of race. ...”
.. the federal government literally has the authority to print money. Once Uncle Sam has an indictment, the odds against the typical defendant in federal drop so low that it usually isn’t worth fighting. Even if you win in court your opponent has bottomless pockets and the ability to file appeals, and even if they don’t get a conviction, they can ruin you financially and threaten to go after both you and your children.
One way or another, the people responsible for this travesty of justice must be held accountable, and the consequences of their egregious abuse of power must be so severe that another 150 years or more pass before another Democrat follows in the footsteps of Boss Tweed and Barack Obama. Full Story - John Leonard - American Thinker
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Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center make headlines by claiming that hate crimes have surged since Trump’s election, but the real surge is in hate-crime hoaxes, especially among university students. The day after the 2016 election, Eleesha Long, a student at Bowling Green State University—about 90 miles west of Oberlin—said that she was attacked by white Trump supporters, who threw rocks at her. Police concluded that she had fabricated the story. That same day, Kathy Mirah Tu, a University of Minnesota student, claimed in a viral social-media post that she was detained by police after fighting a racist man who had attacked her. Campus and local police said that they had had no contact with her. And again that day, a Muslim student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette made up a story about being attacked and robbed by Trump supporters, who supposedly ripped off her hijab. For weeks after Trump’s election, America was fed a series of outrageous stories of campus race hatred that fell apart upon examination. Read More
