A 22-year-old college student from Mississippi was found bludgeoned to death and wrapped in a sheet in the backseat of a car last week, days after her father warned a judge that he would kill her if her boyfriend was released from prison.
Lauren Johansen’s body was found July 3 in Wolf River Cemetery in Harrison County, dismembered and wrapped in trash bags and a tarp, the news station reported. WLOX report.
Her father said the man charged with her murder, her boyfriend, Brisen Rivers, had only been released on bail a few days earlier after being held on kidnapping charges for brutally beating her and holding her hostage during a trip to Nashville in December.
“I sat in a courtroom in Nashville and told the judge that if they let him out I would kill her.” Lance Johansen, the father of the slain student, told WLOX.“He assaulted her. This was probably the fifth or sixth time they had fought and he had hit her.”
Rivers, 23, is currently charged with murder and is being held on $1 million bail.
He was arrested last Thursday, July 4th, after a six-hour manhunt. NOLA.com reported.
Lauren Johansen, of Gulfport, was attending the University of Southern Mississippi to earn a degree in nursing, according to her father, an orthopedic surgeon.
The 22-year-old was first reported missing in the early hours of July 2 when her sister woke up alone in their Hattiesburg apartment they shared, with the front door wide open and the security camera smashed.
That same morning, her father woke up to a notification that her location-tracking app, Life360, had been turned off. He reported her missing to the Hattiesburg Police Department. The next day, officers informed her father that they had found her car in a nearby cemetery.
“We knew she was dead,” Lance Johansen told WLOX, recounting how she was found wrapped in a garbage bag 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 ultimately died. There were multiple holes in her head,” he said.
He continued, “I helped the coroner lift her body from the car. It had been dismembered.”
The grieving father slammed Tennessee’s criminal justice system for failing his family and said Rivers’ bail should never have been reduced.
Rivers’ bail was originally set at $251,000, but after serving seven months in prison, his bail was reduced to $150,000.
Shortly before Rivers’ arrest in December, officers found Lauren Johansen, who had been severely beaten, attempting to flee from a rental car while Rivers reached for a firearm.
“I think the criminal justice system in Nashville, Tennessee, failed my daughter and our family. The world shouldn’t work this way,” he told WLOX. “She was just so beautiful and so, so smart. She had dreams and hopes that were larger than life. Everything that she did, everything that she touched.”
