OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
4:11 PM – Thursday, July 11, 2024
A Mississippi college student, 22, was discovered beaten to death and covered in a sheet in the backseat of her vehicle last week. The girl’s father had previously warned a judge that her boyfriend would kill her if he was released from jail.
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On July 3rd, Lauren Johansen’s body was found disfigured and wrapped in garbage bags and a sheet, according to a report from the outlet WLOX.
Johansen’s father went on to say that his daughter’s boyfriend, Bricen Rivers, 23, had recently been released from custody following his arrest for aggravated kidnapping after severely assaulting Johansen and holding her captive during a trip to Nashville, Tennessee, back in December.
When officers found the couple in December, Johansen was furiously banging on a car window and yelling for help. She had a laceration to her head, her eye was swollen shut, and the vehicle had blood spattered at the front, according to court records, Channel 5 Nashville reported.
“You can see what happened when he hit her 100 times back in December, so just imagine what he did to her when nobody was around to save her,” her father, Lance Johansen, said.
“I sat in the courtroom in Nashville and told the judge that if they let him out, he was going to kill her,” the deceased girl’s dad told WLOX. “He had assaulted her—this was probably the fifth or sixth time where they would get into a fight and he would beat her.”
The accused assailant, Rivers, is now being held on a $1 million bond and is back in jail.
After a six-hour manhunt, he was apprehended last Thursday, July 4th, according to NOLA.com
The 22-year-old’s father, an orthopedic surgeon, said that Lauren Johansen had been pursuing a nursing degree at the University of Southern Mississippi.
When Lauren’s sister awoke alone in their shared Hattiesburg apartment on July 2nd, the sisters’ front door was wide open and their security camera was shattered. This led to the initial report of Lauren’s disappearance.
Her father also received a signal that morning indicating that her location-tracking app, Life360, had been turned off.
After filing a missing person’s complaint with the Hattiesburg Police Department, he received word the following day that her car had been found in a nearby cemetery by the cops.
“I knew she was dead,” Lance Johansen told the outlet, going into detail how she was discovered wrapped up in trash bags and a sheet in the backseat of her vehicle.
“She was basically beaten to death. Her face was smashed in, her head was smashed in, she was brutally beaten to the point she couldn’t see out of either eye when she finally died and there was multiple holes in her head,” he added.
“I helped the coroner lift her body out of the car. It was just mutilated.”
The devastated father said that Rivers’ bond should never have been lowered and lashed out at the Tennessee criminal justice system for abandoning his family.
“I think the criminal justice system in Nashville, Tennessee, failed my daughter and our family. The world shouldn’t work this way,” he told the outlet. “She was really beautiful, super, super smart. She had dreams and hopes that were larger than life. Everything she did, everything she touched.”
After seven months in jail, Rivers’ bond had been reduced from $251,000 to $150,000 by Judge Cheryl Blackburn, according to Channel 5 Nashville. Many community members are now declaring that the judge has “blood on her hands.”
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