LaVena Johnson | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 27, 1985 Florissant, Missouri, U.S. |
| Died | July 19, 2005 (aged 19) Balad, Saladin Governorate, Iraq |
| Allegiance | United States |
| Service | United States Army |
| Years of service | 2004–2005 |
| Rank | Private first class (PFC) |
| Awards | Army Good Conduct Medal Army Commendation Medal |
LaVena Lynn Johnson (July 27, 1985 – July 19, 2005) was a soldier in the United States Army who was found dead in a tent in Iraq. Her death was controversially ruled as a suicide but the evidence of rape and battery led her family to believe the United States Department of Defense covered it up. [1]
The daughter of John Johnson, a service veteran, and Linda Johnson, [2] Johnson was born and grew up in Florissant, Missouri.
Johnson enlisted in the Army on September 15, 2004, after graduating from Hazelwood Central High School. She was deployed to Iraq and stationed in Balad. She had been there for eight weeks before her death on July 19, 2005, eight days before her 20th birthday. [3]
Johnson's death was officially ruled a suicide by the Department of Defense. [4] However, her father became suspicious when he saw her body in the funeral home and decided to investigate. Initially the Army refused to release information, but did so under the Freedom of Information Act after Representative William Lacy Clay, Jr. raised questions about it at the congressional hearings over Pat Tillman's death. [5]
The autopsy report and photographs revealed Johnson had a broken nose, black eye, loose teeth, burns from a corrosive chemical on her genitals, and a gunshot wound to her mouth that seemed inconsistent with suicide. Several reporters have suspected that the chemical burns were the result of attempts to destroy DNA evidence of a sexual assault. Additionally, bloody footprints were discovered outside of her living quarters. [3] [5] [6] [7]
A spokesman from the House Armed Services Committee said that the committee was looking into Johnson's death, but they were not yet committing to a formal investigation in June 2008. Christopher Grey, chief of public affairs for the U.S. Criminal Investigative Command for the Army, has said that the case remains closed as far as they are concerned[ needs update ]. [8]
Following a February 2007 KMOV news report on Johnson's death, an online petition addressed to the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee was launched, closing with 37,319 supporters. This was followed by the creation of an official LaVena Johnson website dedicated to developments in prompting a new Army investigation of her death.[ citation needed ] The petition closed on May 24, 2008, with nearly 12,000 signatures; preparations are being made[ needs update ] for delivery to the two committees. In July 2008, the online black activist group Color of Change launched another online petition [9] calling on Henry Waxman, chair of the House Oversight Committee, to conduct a hearing into LaVena Johnson's death and the Army's handling of her case and others like it. [ citation needed ]
A documentary film about LaVena Johnson's family's struggle for justice was made in 2010, directed by Joan Brooker and titled LaVena Johnson: The Silent Truth . [10]
On July 19, 2011, the criminal justice students in the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute (CCIRI) run as a student club by three universities, selected Johnson's case as their case for investigation. The CCIRI's crime scene reconstruction aimed to help shed light on this case that has attracted worldwide attention. [11] The CCIRI investigation did not agree with nor dispute the Army's findings. Sheryl McCollum of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute calls the case "gut-wrenching." McCollum says the institute normally spends one year on a case, but spent three years on the LaVena Johnson case. In a phone interview with St. Louis Public Radio, McCollum said that she faults the Army for poor communication, but she does not disagree with its conclusion.
"The problem is – number one – the way the notification happened. And the lack of information given to that family fast enough," McCollum said. "There was nothing about this case that we could go back to the Army to say you need to re-look at it," she said. "We didn't have anything new. We didn't have anything that suggested wrongdoing." [12]
Around 2016, attorney Donald V. Watkins publicly named Kevin P. Byrnes as a leading suspect. Since then, attorney Watkins has been released himself from federal prison, and is now working with the Johnson family on a new film about LaVena. [13]
Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, is a British author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction. She is the widow of the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Harold Pinter (1930–2008), and prior to his death was also known as Lady Antonia Pinter.
Fragging is the deliberate or attempted killing of a soldier, usually a superior, by a fellow soldier. U.S. military personnel coined the word during the Vietnam War, when such killings were most often committed or attempted with a fragmentation grenade, to make it appear that the killing was accidental or during combat with the enemy. The term fragging now encompasses any deliberate killing of military colleagues.
Virginia Brown-Waite is an American politician who served as U.S. Representative for Florida's 5th congressional district from 2003 until 2011. She is a member of the Republican Party and a founder of Maggie's List.
Guy Hever is an Israeli MIA. Hever, a soldier in the Israeli Army, has been missing since 17 August 1997. He was last seen on his army base at 9:30 AM on the Golan Heights, dressed in his army fatigues, carrying his weapon, a Galil AR, his military disk and his international military identification papers. The area was searched thoroughly, but to this day his whereabouts are unknown.
Patrick Daniel Tillman Jr. was an American professional football player for the Arizona Cardinals of the National Football League (NFL) who left his sports career and enlisted in the United States Army Special Operations in May 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. His service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his subsequent death, received national attention, especially so when it was discovered he had been killed by friendly fire.
Dorothy Jean Tillman is an American politician, civil rights activist and former Chicago, Illinois alderman. Tillman served as the alderman of the city's 3rd ward from 1985 until 2007. A member of the Democratic Party, representing part of the city's South Side in the Chicago City Council. As an Alderman, Tillman was a strong advocate of reparations for slavery. In April 2007, Tillman was defeated in a runoff election by challenger Pat Dowell. Tillman defeated Dowell in 2003. Prior to her career as an alderman, Tillman was active in the Civil Rights Movement, working for Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as an activist. Tillman was known for wearing large hats and has cultivated this image as her trademark.
The White House travel office controversy, sometimes referred to as Travelgate, was the first major ethics controversy of the Clinton administration. It began in May 1993, when seven employees of the White House Travel Office were fired. This action was unusual because executive-branch employees typically remain in their posts for many years.
In 2005, The New York Times obtained a 2,000-page United States Army investigatory report concerning the homicides of two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners by U.S. military personnel in December 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility in Bagram, Afghanistan, and general treatment of prisoners. The two prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were repeatedly chained to the ceiling and beaten, resulting in their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners' deaths were homicides. Autopsies revealed severe trauma to both prisoners' legs, describing the trauma as comparable to being run over by a bus. Seven soldiers were charged in 2005.
"World Wide Suicide" is a song by the American rock band Pearl Jam. Written by vocalist Eddie Vedder, "World Wide Suicide" was released through digital music stores on March 14, 2006 as the first single from the band's eighth studio album, Pearl Jam (2006). The song topped the Billboard Alternative Songs chart, where it spent a total of three weeks at number one.
Ali Abdullah Ahmed, also known as Salah Ahmed al-Salami, was a citizen of Yemen who died whilst being held as an enemy combatant in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 693. Joint Task Force Guantanamo counter-terror analysts estimated he was born in 1977, in Ibb, Yemen.
Hazelwood Central High School is located at 15875 New Halls Ferry Road in unincorporated St. Louis County, Missouri, adjacent to the current northeast boundary of Florissant. The school is one of three high schools in Hazelwood School District (HSD), the others being Hazelwood East High School and Hazelwood West High School.
The Mahmudiyah rape and killings were a series of war crimes committed by five U.S. Army soldiers during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, involving the gang-rape and murder of 14-year-old Iraqi girl Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the murder of her family on March 12, 2006. It occurred in the family's house to the southwest of Yusufiyah, a village to the west of the town of Al-Mahmudiyah, Iraq. Other members of al-Janabi's family murdered by American soldiers included her 34-year-old mother Fakhriyah Taha Muhasen, 45-year-old father Qassim Hamza Raheem, and 6-year-old sister Hadeel Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. The two remaining survivors of the family, al-Janabi's 9-year-old brother Ahmed and 11-year-old brother Mohammed, were at school during the massacre and orphaned by the event.
Megan Taylor Meier was an American teenager who died by suicide by hanging herself three weeks before her 14th birthday. A year later, Meier's parents prompted an investigation into the matter and her suicide was attributed to cyberbullying through the social networking website MySpace. Lori Drew, Meier's neighbor and the mother of Meier's classmate, was found guilty of cyberbullying in the 2009 case United States v. Drew, but the conviction was later overturned.
The deaths of Phillip Esposito and Louis Allen occurred on June 7, 2005, at Forward Operating Base Danger in Tikrit, Iraq. Captain Phillip Esposito and First Lieutenant Louis Allen, from a New York Army National Guard unit of the United States 42nd Infantry Division, were mortally wounded in Esposito's office by a Claymore mine and died.
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning is an American activist and whistleblower. She is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents. She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017 when her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama. A trans woman, Manning said in 2013 that she had a female gender identity since childhood and wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning.
Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz was a crime reporter who had worked for nearly three decades for Notiver, the largest-circulation newspaper in Veracruz, Mexico. She was kidnapped on July 24, 2011, and her corpse was found beheaded two days later in the neighboring port town of Boca del Río. The crime remains unsolved with no charges brought and different hypotheses in existence. The general attorney of the state of Veracruz, Reynaldo Escobar, said that the investigation was considering the alleged relationship of some journalists with organized crime. Notiver saw these declarations as a menace to journalists and linked the slaying to Ordaz's investigation of the murder of three colleagues a month earlier.
This article lists events involving women in warfare and the military in the United States from 2000 until 2010. For 2011 onward, please see Timeline of women in warfare and the military in the United States, 2011–present.
Keith English was an American politician, union electrician, and business owner from the state of Missouri. English served as a member of the Missouri House of Representatives from Florissant, Missouri. He was elected to his first two-year term in November 2012.
On 25 April 2015, the ruling political party in Burundi, the National Council for the Defense of Democracy – Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD-FDD), announced that the incumbent President of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza, would run for a third term in the 2015 presidential election. The announcement sparked protests by those opposed to Nkurunziza seeking a third term in office.
Sheryl "Mac" McCollum (née Powell) is an American crime analyst, college professor, author, and founder and director of the non-profit Cold Case Investigative Research Institute based in Atlanta, Georgia, and a crime scene analyst for a CBS affiliate.
