Saturday, October 12, 2013

9:21 AM News – There is a story I have been following that looks like a murder, but authorities have ruled it accidental. That is the death of Kendrick Johnson at Lowndes County High School in southern Georgia on January 11, 2013. His body was found inside a rolled up gym mat head first. According to one report, the gym mat was stacked vertically up against the wall. The local Sheriff Chris Prine announced that he had been reaching inside for his sneaker “and got caught up in it,” an accident. The parents didn't believe the story – it does sound impossible to me, since the space inside the rolled up bag was so small that his body wouldn't have simply slipped inside. It had to have been placed on the mat and then been rolled up in it, by one or more other people. Note, in the first report of this death that I found, dated January 11, 2013, according to Internet source Fox 31, “Prine also detailed that the body was not rolled up in a gym mat, but was found next to several mats stacked up along the gym wall.,” yet within days CNN's January 14 report states that Johnson was rolled up in a wrestling mat. One report that I saw, perhaps on television, said that the sheriff moved the body. There is enough confusion there to warrant an investigation of the sheriff's department as to what really happened. Why did the sheriff change his story?

The parents asked for the security films from four cameras in the gym, but their request was denied. The first autopsy showed cause of death to be “positional suffocation,” and then his body was buried. From a CNN report, “A January 25 report by the Valdosta-Lowndes County Regional Crime Laboratory cited "no signs of blunt force trauma on Johnson's face or body." Recently the family has had the body exhumed for a second autopsy by an independent examiner.

At the site, “a pair” – not said to be Kendrick's, and not in keeping with the story that Johnson fell into the rolled up mat seeking his tennis shoe – of orange and black gym shoes were found a few yards from his body, with something that looked like blood on them. Authorities said it was not blood, so they didn't collect the shoes for evidence, nor a hooded sweatshirt that was found nearby as well. According to a CNN Internet report, “The next pictures of the teenager are far more horrifying: His body, clad in jeans and layered orange and white T-shirts, is wedged in the wrestling mat. His face is bloated with pooled blood, some of which poured out of his body and soaked his dreadlocks and spilled onto the floor.” Yet the first autopsy found accidental death with “no significant injury.” The second autopsy, by Dr. Bill Anderson, found “a blow to the right side of the neck, consistent with inflicted injury.”

The Johnson family are planning to file suit to force a coroner's inquest to determine cause of death in the near future, “authorities would logically reopen their investigation.” The family hopes that, with a coroner's inquest, the full video from the gymnasium will be viewed and the information as to who discarded the internal organs will come to light. Let's hope that a simple matter of “logic” is what is involved in this bizarre case, and not an intentional attempt to bury evidence by the prosecution.

One mystery is the fact that the internal organs, which are supposed to be placed in a plastic bag into the body cavity and closed up after the autopsy, either were not sent to the mortuary by the George Bureau of Investigation at the time of death, or the mortuary for some reason failed to include them with the body, and instead placed old newspapers inside the body and buried it. The mortuary claims that they never received the organs, and in a letter from the funeral home's owner Antonio Harrington, the organs were “discarded by the prosecutor.” The organs should be tested and examined as a part of an autopsy, so the second autopsy had to be conducted without them.

As news comes out about this case, I will include it in this blog. Meanwhile, I have finished the mystery Death Of A Witch, which ends with a female killer named Tilly, whose reputation was above reproach, but who actually had a long history of beating her husband. He, ashamed to admit that it was happening, wouldn't go for help or sue for divorce in the ultraconservative society of the village. She began by killing the “witch” who was giving out Spanish Fly to the village men, and she had found out that her husband was one of the men who had been her patrons. Then she foolishly told a woman friend of hers, and when the woman didn't respond in complete sympathy, she killed her friend to keep her from telling about it. Then a postmistress who began to tell the story that she knew who the killer was, but was too afraid to tell about it, became the next victim. Then finally, she tried to kill one of the three lady friends of the village police officer MacBeth because she, too, had given out hints that she knew who did it. MacBeth, in the nick of time, finds out about Tilly's going up to the hotel to attack MacBeth's girlfriend and rushes up there in time to see Tilly attack his friend with a knife. He captures her and places her under arrest. The girlfriend had already suspected Tilly, and was wearing an old wartime flak jacket under her sweater, so the knife was deflected. So MacBeth, after some plot byplay of a humorous nature, is at peace again and goes off on a trip to Spain that his mother won in a contest. This was well-written, as all her books are, and kept me entertained if not frightened until the end.

I'm now going to start what will probably be a more serious type of mystery, called Deliver Us From Evil, by David Baldacci, published in 2010. According to Wikipedia, he was born and raised in Richmond, VA, and has a BA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a law degree from the University of Virginia. He practiced law for nine years in Washington, DC. He wrote short stories and then screen plays from the time he was a child with little success, and then while in law school wrote his first novel Absolute Power. It was published in 1996, and was an international best seller. Since that time he has published 25 more bestselling novels for adults and three for children. He and his wife have founded the Wish You Well Society, which works to combat illiteracy. He also wrote the screenplay for his novel Wish You Well scripts for the TNT television series King and Maxwell, based on two of his characters.

3:33 A decrepit old Nazi meets an untimely end at the age of 96 in Buenos Aires. A voluptuous woman escapes his estate through a window and is carried away by a waiting car to seek out other “monsters” to eliminate. She is a part of a team of assassins who are tracking down men who have escaped punishment for their crimes, following the leadership of a professor in Great Britain. This doesn't sound like the most realistic story on earth, but maybe it will be exciting.

Holodomor – Wikipedia article verifying an event of 1932 and 1933 mentioned in this novel. Holodomor is a Ukrainian term meaning “extermination by hunger.” Some scholars believe that Stalin engineered a famine in the Ukraine and the Cossacks that killed in the range of 3,000,000 people to stamp out Ukrainian nationalism, in other words, genocide. Other scholars believe “natural factors and bad economic policies” were to blame at least in part.