Pt. 5/5. Pvt. Lavena L. Johnson. Non Combat Deaths.org.

http://non-combat-death.org/SurnamesJL.htm
http://www.marieclaire.com/world-reports/news/latest/who-killed-lavena-johnson

Shortly after midnight on July 19, 2005, a shift supervisor at a military cafeteria in Balad, Iraq, hears a loud bang that sounds like a car backfiring and races to the tent where it came from. He looks inside. Private First Class LaVena Johnson, 19, a vegan and an honor-roll student who once dreamed of going to film school in Los Angeles, is dead of a gunshot wound to the head.

She is lying on a bed of rocky soil, with gashes on both sides of her mouth; her hair is tangled in the dirt. An M16 is lying on the ground beside her. A Bible, a package of M&Ms, and a pack of Marlboro Lights are also near her body.

Today, more than three years later, LaVena's parents, Dr. John and Linda Johnson, are still looking for answers. Who killed their daughter?

Officials at the Army Criminal Investigation Command spent nine months on the case. They closed the investigation on April 28, 2006, ruling LaVena's death a suicide. Her file is "inches thick," says spokesman Chris Grey. "We stand by our investigation."

But LaVena's father says the Army is lying--he thinks his daughter was murdered. She showed no signs of wanting to kill herself during the two months she spent in Iraq; two days before she died, LaVena told her father she was coming home in November to get the house ready for Christmas. "Don't start decorating without me," she said.

Johnson isn't the only one questioning the suicide ruling. Ann Wright, a retired Army colonel and former diplomat who has written about LaVena for the political website TruthOut, is among hundreds of people who have signed a petition (lavenajohnson.com) demanding that the Army reopen the investigation. "They need to get to the bottom of whether she was a suicide or murder victim," Wright says. Meanwhile, at a hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in April 2007, Congressman William Lacy Clay Jr. (D--MO) said the Johnson family has been "met by a wall of disrespect, evasion, and a failure to provide them with the answers that the parents of any fallen soldier deserve." Now, as a result of pressure from Congressman Clay and the Johnson family, officials "are looking into the case," according to a House Armed Services Committee spokeswoman, to determine if they should pursue a formal investigation of the matter.

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• jim fetzer

[centurion180ad]

@savvy1954 Your are exactly correct.

I'd like to know who her Squad Leader was, and who the Sergeant of the Guard for her sector was the night she went missing. Didn't anyone tell her to pair up with a buddy in a God damn Theater of War, and go NOWHERE alone? Didn't her barracks have an armed Guard Corporal after sundown?

I'd have HUNTED the God damn prick down myself armed for bear back in the day, if some insane animal had ravaged & murdered one of MY shipmates. If he flinched, BANG!

[centurion180ad]

To hear the father discuss talking to those who knew his daughter, it sounds like she was employed at a supermarket or post office down the street not with an Army unit in a Theater of War.

There is no mention of her Platoon Sergeant, or Platoon Commander, or First Sergeant, or Squad Leader, or of the Sergeant of the Guard for her sector the night she was executed.

1 man an insane sadist mercenary did this, and she did not know him as much by name before hand. Stalk. Rape. Execution.

[VIRASAGE]

this is very unacceptable.

[savvy1954]

this is sickening...a black girl goes missing, raped, beaten, and thrown with acid - from her fathers mouth (autopsy) YET, PVT. (ARMY) JESSICA LYNCH (WHITE GIRL, who i won't even discuss the sorry crap half truth got a $2 million book deal, a t.v. show approved by pentagon and 100% disability for the rest of her life...this is BULLSHIT, i would not ALLOW MY DAUGHTER TO JOIN THE ARMY OF ALL MILITARY BRANCHES