By Brooke Mallory, OAN Staff
Thursday, July 11, 2024 4:11 PM
A 22-year-old Mississippi college student was found beaten to death and covered in a sheet in the backseat of a car last week. The girl’s father had previously warned a judge that her boyfriend would kill her if he was released from prison.
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July 3rdLauren Johansen’s body was found defaced and wrapped in garbage bags and a sheet, according to reports. Warocks.
Johansen’s father also said that his daughter’s boyfriend, 23-year-old Brisen Rivers, had been arrested and recently released from prison for violently assaulting and imprisoning Johansen during a trip to Nashville, Tennessee, in December of last year.
When officers found the couple in December, Johansen was banging on the car window and screaming for help. She had a laceration on her head, her eye was swollen shut and there was blood splattered on the front of the car, according to court documents. Channel 5 Nashville report.
“We know what happened in December when he hit her 100 times, so imagine what he did to her when there was no one there to help her,” her father, Lance Johansen, said.
“I sat in that courtroom in Nashville and told the judge that if he was released I would kill her,” said the father of the dead girl. WLOX“He assaulted her. This was probably the fifth or sixth time they had fought and he had hit her.”
The suspect, Rivers, is currently being held on $1 million bail and is back in jail.
He was arrested last Thursday, July 4th, after a six-hour manhunt.NumberAccording to NOLA.com
Lauren Johansen was pursuing a nursing degree at the University of Southern Mississippi, according to her father, the 22-year-old orthopedic surgeon.
On July 2nd, Lauren’s sister woke up alone in her Hattiesburg apartment.andAt the time, the front door to the sisters’ home was wide open and the security cameras were smashed, which led to the initial reports of Lauren disappearance.
Her father also received a signal that morning indicating his daughter’s location-tracking app, Life360, had been turned off.
After filing a missing person’s report with the Hattiesburg Police Department, she was notified the next day that officers had found her car in a nearby cemetery.
“We knew she was dead,” Lance Johansen told the outlet, recounting how she was found wrapped in a garbage bag and a sheet in the back seat of a car.
“She was beaten to death. She was beaten in the face and head, beaten so brutally that she lost sight in both eyes and eventually died. There were multiple holes in her head,” he added.
“I helped the coroner lift her body out of the car. It had been dismembered.”
The grieving father said Rivers’ bail should never have been lowered and slammed Tennessee’s criminal justice system for failing his family.
“I feel that the criminal justice system in Nashville, Tennessee, failed my daughter and our family. The world shouldn’t work this way,” he told the media outlet. “She was just so beautiful and very, very smart. She had dreams and hopes that were larger than life. Everything that she did, everything that she touched.”
After seven months incarcerated, Rivers’ bail was reduced from $251,000 to $150,000 by Judge Cheryl Blackburn. Channel 5 NashvilleMany local residents have declared that the judge now has “blood on his hands.”
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