The great tragedy is the war was not needed it was fear of black messiah complex again. No weapons of mass destruction it was just hoops. Lavena Lynn Johnson’s story was about women and men being raped in the military it is not something they want to talk about. How they could with a good heart say this was suicide is beyond me. I will let the video talk for themselves she was 19 years old a baby. She needs justice are family needs monetary justice for messing up this investigation. Just Like Pat Tillman, he died with friendly fire and the first narrative was he died fighting the enemy. They lied and got quiet with is family. I will pull the stories of up on video and put in in this link, Americans need to know.
Lavena Johnson and Kamisha Block both died in Iraq — but not at the hands of enemy combatants. Block was killed by her boyfriend, and Johnson, well… The truth of both deaths was covered up.
Illustration for an article titled What’s The Military Hiding About LaVena Johnson Kamisha Blocks Deaths?
There Really Aren’t Ways In Which They Won’t Lie
Army Specialist Kamisha Block died last summer in what the Army officially characterized as a…
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An LA Times piece by David Zucchino looks at what’s happened in the investigation into LaVena Johnson’s death since we wrote about it last summer. Sadly, nothing much has changed.
Johnson maintains that his daughter was raped and killed and that her death scene was staged to make it appear as if she shot herself. He accuses the Army of covering up for a killer or killers to conceal a soldier-on-soldier slaying, explaining that military personnel would have had unrestricted access to the area where his daughter died and therefore would not have attracted undue attention.
If LaVena’s death were investigated as a homicide, Johnson added, it would raise questions about base security and discourage women from enlisting.
In fact, in the information released to Johnson, the investigators speculated that Johnson was depressed after a break-up and finding out that she had condyloma — a sexually transmitted infection better known as “genital warts.” In fact, investigators have an answer for every piece of evidence that contradicts the story that Johnson killed herself.
Grey, the Army spokesman, said the only blood found outside the tent was on a bench that had been removed after LaVena’s body was discovered. Investigators are not aware of any boot prints in blood or on a cement bag, and they found no cuts, bruises, or abrasions on her body “that would have led us to believe that they had been created by suspicious means,” Grey said.
Investigators believe the bullet went through an open tent flap window, Grey said. They concluded that LaVena had started a small fire inside the tent and burned pages from her journal before she shot herself.
Grey said investigators demonstrated that it was “easily possible” for a person of LaVena’s stature to shoot herself through the mouth with an M-16. And because investigators found no evidence of sexual assault, Grey said, there was no reason to collect vaginal or fingernail swabs.
Paul Stone, a spokesman for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, said the damage to LaVena’s face was consistent with the rapidly expanding gases discharged by an M-16, which he said could break bones and leave bruises and abrasions. The institute also concluded that LaVena committed suicide.
Part of the reason that none of these answers sound completely convincing is that the military does have quite the recent history of covering up the murder of female soldiers.
A case in point is Kamisha Block, whose death Peter Wilkinson sensitively explores in Maxim (no, for real! Maxim!). Kamisha, as it turns out, got involved with an abusive man to whom she reported, Staff Sergeant Paul Brandon Norris, which is a no-no in the military and has gotten people discharged. Instead, his superiors looked the other way as he transferred units to be closer to his girlfriend, threw fits, and acted increasingly jealous in the weeks before shooting her 5 times in a rage.
Back at Fort Hood, Kamisha began to get a sense of Norris’ consuming jealousy. One day, while packing up a truck, Kamisha had trouble lifting a box. A male corporal walked up to help and accidentally brushed her breast. According to a witness, an outraged Norris grabbed him by the collar and chewed out both the corporal and Kamisha. She complained to friends how “aggressive” Norris was with her, “in and out of bed.”
Besides verbal abuse, Jane Block says, Staff Sergeant Norris also allegedly began physically abusing Kamisha: “He first assaulted her at Fort Hood. A friend of Kamisha’s called me and said, ‘He grabbed her by the throat and shoved her against a wall.'” No charges were ever filed.
“Norris was high-strung,” recalls a fellow MP. “He was always shouting at soldiers.”
And that’s just when they were stateside.
Norris had arrived at Camp Liberty in late June, several weeks after Kamisha. Within days she found herself transferred to Norris’ 10-person squad. The word around Camp Liberty was that someone up the chain of command had done Norris a favor.
It’s quite the favor, to get the woman you’re not legally allowed to sleep with transferred into your unit.
To those soldiers stationed under him, Norris seemed to have a knack for taking things too far. If Kamisha showed up somewhere on base, Norris more often than not appeared as well. “Every night, Norris would find some time to spend with Specialist Block, using the excuse that he ‘couldn’t sleep’ or that he had ‘a lot of problems and needed somebody to talk to,'” recalls one soldier in a sworn statement. “I made comments to Specialist Block’s old squad leader that he should do something or say something, to tell Staff Sergeant Norris the relationship was getting out of hand. The squad leader would laugh it off and say, ‘There’s nothing I can do.'”
It wasn’t until people in the unit started dying that Norris’ superiors stopped laughing.
Several days later, on July 23, a senior officer confronted Brandon Norris, who flatly denied dating Kamisha. That same day a platoon sergeant sat down with Norris to discuss the “inappropriate relationship” and the allegation, from senior leaders, that he was showing Kamisha preferential treatment. In that meeting, the counselor, who observed that “staff sergeants don’t hang out with specialists,” issued a stern warning: “This relationship must stop immediately. Specialist Block will be reassigned to 1st Squad, and if you have any business that needs to deal with Spc. Block, you will use the chain of command or the NCO [noncommissioned officer] support channel.”
Norris wasn’t exactly willing to let it go, nor take responsibility for his own actions. He was, however, willing to ratchet up his abuse of Block.
Norris seemed to shift his anger from potential rivals toward Kamisha herself, who, friends say, wanted to break things off with her increasingly hostile boyfriend. In the first week of August, Norris upbraided Kamisha publicly, as she stood by her Humvee talking with a male soldier. Norris rushed up to her. “What are you doing hanging around him?” he screamed, grabbing Kamisha by her right arm. When she tried to move away, Norris shouted, “Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you!”
“You’re not supposed to grab other soldiers like that,” the male soldier protested.
“You need to stay out of this,” a seething Norris replied. “This is between an NCO and a soldier.”
Three weeks later, he walked into Block shared barracks, ordered her roommate out and began yelling, finally firing his weapon into the wall to scare her. That’s when her roommate ran back in.
Norris wheeled and pointed the Beretta at Jennings, who jumped behind a nearby barrier, then ran for help. It was too late. Inside trailer #15-255-C, Norris unloaded, shooting Kamisha Block five times, including rounds to her shoulder, chest, and head. Then, as his girlfriend lay on the floor of her trailer mortally wounded, Brandon Norris turned the gun on himself, putting a single bullet into the right side of his head. Medics who arrived minutes later found Norris dead at the scene and Kamisha, her pulse weak, wheezing, with a sucking chest wound.
Then, Army officials told her family that she was killed by friendly fire. It took Block’s mother’s personal investigation and quite a crusade to get the Army to admit that she’s been deliberately killed by a superior officer with whom she was involved in an illegal and abusive relationship that their superiors had chosen to overlook for months. The revised report that the Army did release, however, was so heavily redacted and missing information that Block’s former Congressman, Kevin Brady (R-Texas), had to pressure the Defense Department’s inspector general to investigate the investigation.
So, basically, both women are still dead and the military’s apparently still hiding things. Johnson’s father thinks that they’re doing it so as not to hurt recruitment because finding out the military won’t help you get out of abusive relationships or hold people accountable for your death is definitely worse than finding out they’ll actively lie to your family about it.
Father Disputes Army’s Suicide Finding In Daughter’s Death [LA Times]
Love And Death In Iraq [Maxim]
Earlier: LaVena Johnson: Murdered By Her Colleagues, Ignored By The Army
There Really Aren’t Ways In Which They Won’t Lie
The New York Times today recounts the ongoing and frustrating efforts of Patrick K. Tillman to learn just how his son Pat died in Afghanistan. Cpl. Pat Tillman went from professional football player to Army Ranger to martyred hero to the victim of an unexplained friendly fire incident. His story is nationally known – even if the actual circumstances of his death are not – due in large part to the lionization of Cpl. Tillman by the public and the media in the early days after his death. Now that the initial account of that death has unraveled, the story’s notoriety has forced a belated official investigation:
After repeated complaints from the Tillmans and members of Congress contacted by them, the Army is immersed in a highly unusual criminal investigation of the killing, and the Defense Department’s inspector general, which called for the criminal investigation this month, is looking separately into the Army’s conduct in its aftermath.
Senior military officials said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had expressed outrage to top aides that the Army was having to conduct yet another inquiry into the shooting, prolonging the family’s anguish and underscoring the failure of the Army’s investigative processes to bring resolution.
When even Rumsfeld takes an interest – Rumsfeld, who famously once allowed his signature to be rubber-stamped on letters sent to the families of those killed in action rather than taking the time to sign them himself – you can be sure that official attention is finally being brought to bear. That raises a troubling question, however, one asked aloud by the mother of Cpl. Tillman:
“This is how they treat a family of a high-profile individual,” she said. “How are they treating others?”
This brings us to the matter of Pfc. LaVena Johnson.
Pfc. Johnson was no professional athlete prior to military service. She was an honor roll student out of Hazelwood Central High here in the St. Louis area with straight As in her senior year. She played the violin, she donated blood, she volunteered for American Heart Association walks. Johnson elected to put off college for a while and joined the Army once out of school. At Fort Campbell, KY, she was assigned as a weapons supply manager to the 129th Corps Support Battalion. Johnson was shipped out to Iraq despite – according to family accounts – having flunked her weapons training.
Private LaVena Johnson of Florissant, MO, died near Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005, just eight days shy of her twentieth birthday. She was the first woman soldier from Missouri to die while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.
According to Johnson’s father, Dr. Jack Johnson, an Army representative said that his daughter died of “died of self-inflicted, noncombat injuries,” but initially added that it was not a suicide. As described by St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Norm Parish, the story soon became confused. First, the Army public affairs officer at Fort Campbell confirmed that Johnson had been shot in the head. He later reversed himself, stating that he could not confirm that injury. A local employee at the chapel handling Johnson’s funeral arrangements did confirm a wound on the left side of Johnson’s head that appeared to be a bullet hole.
The Army announced that the matter had been referred to its Criminal Investigation Division, all while maintaining that the referral did not mean that a crime had been committed. Less than a week later, the Army ruled Johnson’s death a suicide. Dr. Johnson refuted the finding and pointed to indications that his daughter had endured a physical struggle before she died – two loose front teeth, a “busted lip” that had to be reconstructed by the funeral home – suggesting that “someone might have punched her in the mouth.” Also in this later story by the P-D’s Parish:
In the interview, he said the wound to the left side of his daughter’s head may be an indication that someone else was involved since she was right-handed. “I’m not a forensic expert, but I am just talking about what seems obvious to me,” he said.
And since then there has been little heard of the death of LaVena Johnson or the investigation into that death. The office of U.S. Representative William Lacy Clay announced that it would press the military for answers, but no public statements at all have been issued by that office in the past months. The P-D did run a follow-up piece on the Johnson family written during the holidays. According to that piece, the Army’s investigation was still ongoing though officials offered no comment. That official silence is to be expected, perhaps, yet perhaps not to be entirely trusted.
At first glance, the contrast between the cases of Pat Tillman and LaVena Johnson seems disturbingly vast, but at the core, the situations are the same. In each case, the death of a young person who served us in a dangerous place and time was not explained to the families they left behind the families that gave them up so that they could serve us. An honest accounting of their passing is all the dead ask of us. We owe them that much.
The facts behind Pat Tillman’s death, whatever they may be, could easily have officially ignored and would be now saved only for the public attention already invested in his story.
The facts behind the death of LaVena Johnson – whatever they maybe – deserve no less attention.
(All Post-Dispatch stories on LaVena Johnson now behind that paper’s archive wall. Thanks to Grey Eagle: A Female Soldier for its post on Pfc. Johnson. This piece is cross-posted.)
Ten years after Army Private LaVena Lynn Johnson died in Iraq, her father keeps family photographs of her tucked away in his basement office in his Florissant home, so that his wife doesn’t see them.
John Johnson says she finds the images too painful to look at: A smiling LaVena in gold cap and gown, Class of 2004, Hazelwood Central High. LaVena posing in a powder blue formal gown.
The Army says the 19-year-old soldier killed herself in Iraq — a finding that her family has never believed.
For ten years, Johnson has been on a mission to find his own answers to what happened to his pretty daughter who played the violin and wanted to be a movie producer. The honor student who took after him.
LaVena Johnson joined the Army after graduating from Hazelwood Central High School
CREDIT PHOTO COURTESY ST. LOUIS AMERICAN
“All her life, Lavena was told, ‘You look like your daddy. You act like your daddy. You think like your daddy,’ ’’ Johnson says.
He treasures the Father’s Day card she sent just weeks before she died on July 19, 2005. It said: Like father, like daughter.
“It was a beautiful, beautiful card,’’ he says. “And she talked about what an honor it was for her to be compared to me. Something that people had done from the moment she came on this earth.’’
He says that LaVena’s decision to join the Army was influenced by his own career path. He lived with his family in the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis until he graduated from high school. He joined the Army, serving for three years. After his discharge, he went to college, eventually earning a doctorate in psychology. Both he and his wife had civilian jobs in troop support for the Army. They’ve been married for 38 years.
The Johnsons had five children, and LaVena felt she should pay her own way through college, her father says. He and his wife were hesitant, but LaVena thought the Army seemed like a good way to do it.
Even without her photos on the walls, the sunny two-story house where LaVena grew up is filled with her memories. Johnson recalls vividly the moment everything changed — when the doorbell rang too early on a summer morning.
“Linda got up and looked out the window and she said, ‘John there’s a soldier standing on the porch.’ I knew then … it was not good news. Something has happened to LaVena.”
He recalls the soldier’s voice … LaVena was dead … self-inflicted wounds. His wife was screaming.
“She was up on that balcony and it was oh God, it was horrible,’ ’’ Johnson says. “I’m sitting there on the steps and I’m listening to the chaos that’s in my house, and I’m watching this guy and he’s standing there like he’s a statue.’’
ListenListening…4:26Listen to John Johnson talk about his daughter’s case.
The Johnsons could not believe what they were hearing. They had just talked to LaVena two days before. She was telling them about her plans. She was about to start a new job on the Army base, and her outfit — the 129th Corps Support Battalion — would be rotating back to the States in a few months. She would be home in time to help her father decorate the Christmas tree, a tradition she and her younger sister enjoyed every year.
“She was looking forward to her future. Looking forward to coming home and looking forward to having another job,’’ Johnson says.
John Johnson stands at the front door of his home in Florissant, where a soldier delivered the news of his daughter’s death ten years ago.
CREDIT MARY DELOACH LEONARD | ST. LOUIS PUBLIC RADIO
“They didn’t give me any information”
Information from the Army was vague and contradictory, Johnson says. He told the media that he had suspicions about his daughter’s death, even as she was being buried with military honors at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. She was promoted posthumously to private first class and awarded good conduct and commendation medals.
“When you come and tell me my 19-year-old daughter didn’t value life and that’s all she did, she valued all life. You tell me she committed suicide, but you didn’t tell me what she did. Whether she jumped off a bridge. They didn’t give me any information,’’ he says.
The official investigation took months and was conducted by special agents from the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, which investigates soldiers’ deaths and crimes within the Army. (It’s the Army’s counterpart to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, made familiar by the TV series “N.C.I.S.”)
Investigators concluded that Private Johnson shot herself in the mouth with her M-16 rifle in a contractor’s tent on the military base in Balad, Iraq, where she was stationed. The report included witness testimony suggesting that she may have been depressed over a recent breakup.
John Johnson would have none of it. He demanded to see the Army’s evidence. He filed Freedom of Information requests and enlisted the assistance of local legislators.
In a statement to St. Louis Public Radio, U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay said that his staff devoted hundreds of hours to helping the Johnson family discover the truth about the case, including helping them obtain the original autopsy report and photos.
“PFC Johnson gave her life for her country. And her country has an obligation to tell her family the whole truth about her death,” Clay said.
John Johnson keeps photographs of LaVena in his basement office because his wife finds them too painful to look at.
CREDIT MARY DELOACH LEONARD | ST. LOUIS PUBLIC RADIO
Johnson formed his own investigative team, enlisting the help of family members who have studied criminal science. For eight years they have pored over the investigation documents; studied the horrifying photographs; analyzed witness statements.
Johnson doesn’t mince words: He believes his daughter was raped and murdered, her death covered up.
Johnson says he had to find the strength to look at the autopsy photos of his daughter – and to examine her body before the funeral. In 2007, he made another difficult decision: having her body exhumed for an independent autopsy. The results were inconclusive.
“There were some things I had to do,’’ he says.
Johnson disputes practically everything about the Army’s conclusion. He says her commanding officer described her as happy and healthy. He contends that her arms were too short; that she couldn’t have shot herself with her rifle, and that the wound in her head was too small to have been made by an M-16. He says the pictures tell him that LaVena had been beaten. There was no suicide note; the bullet that killed her was not found.
Johnson believes the Army’s findings were flawed because, he says, her death was investigated as a suicide, not a homicide.
“All of us can’t be wrong about the evidence that we’ve compiled. It is awful, awful, awful compelling,’’ Johnson says. “And, unfortunately, Lavena got lost in all of this and just lost everything trying to be a good American citizen.’’
The Army stands by its findings
Christopher Grey, chief of public affairs for the Criminal Investigation Command, said in a statement that LaVena Johnson’s death was “a tragic suicide.” That the investigation was lengthy and thorough. And that investigators would immediately reopen the investigation should credible information surface.
“We express our sincere condolences to the family and friends of PFC Johnson. We have and continue to take the death of PFC LaVena Johnson very seriously,’’ Grey said.
“Our lengthy and very thorough investigation by highly-trained Special Agents is based in fact; testimonial evidence, physical evidence and forensic evidence. The independent autopsy findings by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s Office came to the same conclusion. Tragically, there are many misrepresentations of the facts being circulated on the internet that are false and unsubstantiated.’’
The LaVena Johnson story has been heavily reported by local and national media, especially in the early years. More recently, the circumstances of her death have been questioned widely by bloggers and petitions on social media demand that the investigation is reopened. Advocates who work to raise awareness about sexual abuse in the military, have also called attention to the case.
Sheryl McCollum of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute calls the case “gut-wrenching. “ The institute is a national collaboration of college students who work to solve unsolved crimes. They agreed to review the case in 2011 at the request of the Johnsons. McCollum says the institute normally spends one year on a case, but spent three years on the LaVena Johnson case.
Everybody said that LaVena took after him, says her father John Johnson.
CREDIT FAMILY PHOTO
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.
Students were very moved by LaVena’s story, she said. They reviewed every page of the documents, the photographs, talked to witnesses and dozens of independent experts — and recreated the scene.
“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.’’
McCollum said the institute operates independently; it didn’t work for the Army or for the Johnson family. Results are not published, but she does brief the investigating agencies on findings.
“I wish I could call that family with something different,’’ she added.
“They plucked out part of my heart”
But John Johnson remains as convinced today as he was 10 years ago that his daughter did not — would not — commit suicide and that her murder was covered up.
“They plucked out part of my heart,’’ he says. “I can’t get it back. But I’m going to fight until I get justice for her. We’re just going to keep doing what we can to keep our story alive.”
John and Linda Johnson, left, at the funeral of their daughter in 2005.
CREDIT WILEY PRICE / ST. LOUIS AMERICAN
He says a communications professional has joined his team, and they will be releasing more findings from their years-long investigation.
Johnson says his wife lets him speak for the family; she doesn’t want to do interviews.
“I’m a fighter,’’ he says. “She’s a loving person, and that was her baby.”
LaVena Lynn Johnson was the first female soldier from Missouri to die in Iraq. She died just days before her 20th birthday in 2005, one year after graduating from high school. After her funeral, family, and friends released birthday balloons at her gravesite.
On July 27, she would have been 30 years old.
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