PFC LaVena Johnson

On 19 July 2005, Private First Class LaVena Lynn Johnson was found dead in a contractor’s tent on an Army base in Balad, Iraq. The Army officially ruled her death a suicide, but when her father, Dr. John Johnson, saw LaVena’s body and spoke with the doctor who performed her autopsy, something didn’t quite add up…

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At 7:30 AM on a Tuesday in late July 2005, Dr. John and Mrs. Linda Johnson were going through the motions of their daily routine when they heard a knock at the door. Linda looked out the window and saw a soldier in Army fatigues standing outside. “John,” she said. “There is a soldier on our front porch.”

“Oh my god,” was John’s immediate reaction.

John and Linda had five children; three sons and two daughters. Their fourth child, a daughter, named LaVena, had just joined the Army in September the year before, and she was currently 7,000 miles away and six weeks into her first deployment in Iraq.

John Johnson had served as active duty in the military and worked for the US Army for nearly three decades as a civilian psychologist, so he was well aware that a soldier didn’t show up on your front porch unless they had bad news. John knew something had happened to LaVena.

Sure enough, when they opened the front door of their Florissant, Missouri family home, the soldier came bearing tragic tidings.

LaVena was dead; she’d been found that morning with a gunshot wound to the head that they believed to be self-inflicted.

Linda Johnson dissolved in grief in their front foyer, while John fell back on the stairs in utter shock. The soldier simply stood there with a cold look on his face.

“Self-inflicted?” Dr. Johnson asked in disbelief. “Are you saying my daughter did this to herself?”

Dr. Johnson later told filmmakers for the 2010 documentary LaVena Johnson: The Silent Truth that the soldier became defensive when asked squarely about whether the death was a suicide. The soldier told him that LaVena’s death was being investigated by the Army. They would be in touch.

Unfortunately, this was only the beginning of the Johnson family’s struggle to get truthful information from the United States Army about the death of their daughter.

This is the story of PFC LaVena Johnson.

LaVena Lynn Johnson was born July 27, 1985. The first daughter of Linda and John Johnson, LaVena had three older brothers she looked up to. Two years later, when Linda gave birth to their second daughter, LaKesha, LaVena relished the role of big sister by taking charge of her baby sister wherever the family went.

According to John Johnson, LaVena showed leadership abilities and great talent early on.

She started singing in the church choir at age four. She made the honor roll in the first grade, and her tenure as a top student continued until she graduated from high school in 2004.

Music became another passion of LaVena’s; she picked up the violin in elementary school and practiced nightly to hone her skills. When her sister learned to play the flute, LaVena orchestrated duet concerts for the family.

She ran track, created award-winning science projects, and got into activism early. By age eleven, LaVena was a dues-paying member of PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and became a vegetarian, a dietary choice she continued until her death.

In May 2004, she graduated with honors from Hazelwood High School. The sky was the limit for LaVena. She wanted to go to a liberal arts college on the West Coast in order to pursue her dreams of becoming a filmmaker.

Knowing her father and mother were putting five kids through college, she was conscious that her collegiate aspirations could possibly be a hardship. One day, before her high school graduation, she approached her father with a decision. She’d been speaking with a recruiter at her school, and she wanted to join the Army.

At first, her parents were shocked. This was not something LaVena had to do; it was something she wanted to do, and she had made up her mind to go through with it. LaVena’s parents went to talk with the recruiter LaVena had worked with before graduation to soothe their fears.

Their main concern was whether their daughter would be deployed; there was a war on, after all. The recruiter assured them the likelihood of that happening was remote… he was wrong.

By July 2005, the United States was nearly four years into the infamous “War on Terror,” and already two years engaged in the Iraq War looking for “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Dictator Saddam Hussein had been deposed as the leader of Iraq, and the United States and its allies were bolstering their forces there as the middle eastern nation descended into a bloody civil war.

Even though more than 3 ½ years had passed since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack (or just say 9/11) that brought down the Twin Towers in New York City and left thousands dead, patriotism among Americans-- and support for the war-- was still at an all-time high. There was a surge in armed forces enlistment; people wanted to serve their country, including 19-year-old LaVena Johnson.

After graduating from high school in May 2004, LaVena joined the United States Army as a private in September. She spent the next ten weeks in basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina learning how to be a soldier.

Through constant letter writing, LaVena kept up her close relationship with her family. She told them all about the demanding physical training, the tough attitudes of the drill instructors, and the rigors of learning the basics. Still, her positive attitude never faltered. Both of her parents had served in the military, so she knew- somewhat- what to expect. She was an incredibly strong and determined person. LaVena wanted to make her family proud.

Unfortunately, despite her recruiters' assurances to the contrary, LaVena was called up on her first deployment in May 2005. Assigned to the 129th Corps Support Battalion, she was sent to Balad, Iraq. Balad is several miles north of the Iraqi capital of Bagdad and home of the Balad Air Base. US forces captured the airbase in 2003. By the time LaVena served, it had been renamed the Anaconda Logistics Support Area.

According to her father, during the six weeks Lavena served in Iraq, she called home almost every day. The last phone call they shared was on July 17th. Linda Johnson described her daughter as jubilant on the phone.

They were making plans for Christmas even though it was only July. LaVena loved Christmas, and she made her mother promise that they wouldn't start decorating the tree without her. Their call took place early in the morning, and LaVena’s parents asked her if they should wake up the rest of the family to talk. LaVena told them no since it was so early and promised she would call back in a day or two. No call ever came.

After the Army messenger showed up at the Johnsons’ house on July 19th and told them LaVena was dead, the family had to organize her funeral. The casualty liaison officer sent to aid the family with the burial process told Dr. Johnson that they recommended a closed casket because (quote) “it wasn’t pretty.”

Johnson went to the funeral home to see his daughter’s body being prepared, and he saw that the liaison officer was right: it wasn’t pretty, but not because she’d been shot in the head. LaVena Johnson had a broken nose, black eyes, and broken teeth. It looked like someone had beaten her up. Even more suspicious, the supposed self-inflicted gunshot wound was on the left side of her head. LaVena was right-handed.

Dr. Johnson made a mental note of every suspicious injury he saw on his daughter’s body and waited to hear from the medical examiner who had performed the autopsy.

The Army assured him that the medical examiner would call him immediately after the autopsy was completed, but Johnson had to wait until August 3rd before he received a call from Dr. Ed Reedy, a full 11 days following the examination.

Dr. Reedy didn’t produce any information upfront; he simply introduced himself and asked Dr. Johnson what he wanted to know. Johnson asked if he had performed a rape kit. Reedy said no- he claimed there was no sign of sexual assault.

Next, Johnson asked why the bullet wound was on the left side of LaVena’s head when she was right-handed. Reedy told him that was an exit wound that she had put an M16 rifle in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

Johnson could scarcely believe what he was hearing: she put an M16 rifle in her mouth to kill herself? LaVena was 5ft 1in tall, and the M16 is a 40-inch weapon. Her arms weren't long enough for her to pull the trigger.

Reedy callously told Johnson, “Well, she managed.”

But, what about the damage a point-blank shot from such a high-caliber weapon would have done to her skull? Why wasn’t the wound bigger? Dr. Reedy told Johnson that he wasn’t looking at the body from the right angle to see the damage properly.

The next step for John Johnson was to look at the autopsy report for himself to see if he could decipher the evidence. The casualty liaison officer working with the family provided a copy of the report on September 19th, and the details were distressing.

The report contained black and white Xeroxed copies of the crime scene photos. They showed LaVena flat on her back in a contractor’s tent with her right arm draped over her face. Her shoes were still on, and there was a sleeping cot between her and an M16 rifle assumed to be the weapon used to end her life. The photos gave Johnson a general picture, but there is only so much you can see in a badly copied black and white photos. He needed to get his hands on the original color photos.

Through witness statements and medical records, the Johnsons found out that LaVena was undergoing medical treatment in Iraq following a sexual assault. She had been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection (genital warts) and was taking medication to eradicate it.

But why hadn’t she mentioned this to her family? A million reasons, but probably because she didn’t want them to worry. News of the assault brought up new questions with relatively few answers; what had actually happened that led to LaVena’s death? Was this a murder?

The initial reason the Army gave the Johnsons for LaVena’s death was a combat-related fatality. Given that LaVena worked as a support operative and not in a combat role, this made little sense. When the family pushed back, the Army then reported to the Johnsons that LaVena was mentally deranged and had shown signs of depression which led her to kill herself.

Dr. Johnson asked the obvious question: what were the signs? He spoke to his daughter nearly every day. The man was a licensed psychologist; did they really think he wouldn’t notice that his daughter was in a severe depressive state? Johnson asked what kind of behavior changes she exhibited to bring them to this conclusion. The Army replied that she had a change in eating habits: LaVena had been eating ice cream 3-4 times a day.

Ice cream? If her eating ice cream in the Iraqi desert was their primary evidence of her depressive state, there were many depressed people around the world.

Then, the Army provided reports from fellow soldiers that said LaVena had just been broken up with by a boyfriend of two months. She allegedly said she hated her life and talked about suicide for several weeks; however, these reports were accompanied by a statement from her commanding officer that said she was immensely positive, disciplined, and well-adjusted. Nothing added up. To Dr. Johnson, things were beginning to look more and more like a coverup.

John Johnson continued this back and forth with the Army liaisons throughout the ten-month investigation into his daughter’s death until the criminal investigator formally announced it was a suicide.

The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command version of what happened to LaVena is as follows:

LaVena got off work on the night of July 18th. She went back to her tent, put on a reflective belt for safety, and then went to the Post Exchange, i.e., a retail store on the Army base, and bought a six-pack of soda, M&Ms, and lip balm. After her purchase, she went back to her tent, dropped the stuff on her bed, picked up her M16 rifle, and then walked to a nearby contractor’s tent. Once inside, she used a can of accelerant to start a small fire, burned pages from her journal (or emails from her ex-boyfriend depending on which source you're reading), and then shot herself in the mouth with her rifle.

There are so many problems with this theory. For one, why would you go buy snacks and lip balm if you were planning to kill yourself within an hour?

The last straw for the Johnsons came after they received a file of information that contained a Xeroxed photo of a CD-Rom. What was on it, they wondered?

Deciding they needed to get a copy of the disc, Dr. Johnson wrote to the Army liaison officer and requested they send it to him. They denied this, saying that the disc contained the names of third parties and to send him the disc would violate their privacy.

If there were people involved with his daughter’s death, he wrote back, he was entitled to their names. The Army stonewalled him and said he could take it up with their legal department, at which point Dr. John Johnson decided he was tired of getting the runaround from people who were not interested in giving him the truth. It was time to go over their heads.

John Johnson went to Washington D.C. and met with his congressman, Rep. William Lacy Clay, to get a copy of the CD-Rom the Army was refusing to hand over. Rep. Clay served as the representative for Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, and by 2007, he was in his seventh year as a United States Congressman.

It just so happened that when Johnson met with Rep. Clay and told him the story of his daughter, LaVena, Clay was part of a congressional probe investigating fraudulent reports from the Department of Defense in regards to the death of Pat Tillman. He was about to partake in a group of hearings, during which he would question high-ranking military officials about their lack of transparency with war-time casualties.

If you’re not familiar with the case of Corporal Pat Tillman, he was an Army Ranger who was killed while serving in Afghanistan in April of 2004. The initial report of his death claimed he had been involved in a hellacious enemy ambush, and through his courageous actions, ushered his team to safety and sustained a mortal wound in the process. He was hailed as an American hero, and President George W. Bush awarded Corporal Tillman the prestigious honor of the Silver Star. An excerpt from the award citation is as follows (supposedly a synopsis of how he died):

“Caught between the crossfire of an enemy near ambush, Corporal Tillman put himself in the line of devastating enemy fire as he maneuvered his fire team to a covered position from which they could effectively employ their weapons on known enemy positions. His audacious leadership and courageous example under fire inspired his men to fight at great risk to their own personal safety, resulting in the enemy's withdrawal, his platoon's safe passage from the ambush kill zone, and his mortal wound. Corporal Tillman's personal courage, tactical expertise, and professional competence directly contributed to his platoon's overall success and survival. In making the ultimate sacrifice for his team and platoon, Corporal Patrick D. Tillman reflected great credit upon himself, the Joint Task Force, and the United States Army.”

As it turns out, that’s not even remotely what happened. The hero story was completely made up. Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire, meaning one of his fellow soldiers shot and mortally wounded him. This decidedly less heroic, yet tragic story was kept under wraps until almost two months later when the Pentagon informed the Tillman family of the actual manner of his death. The realization led to outrage, and people began making accusations against the Army for manufacturing an American hero to help bolster public support for the war. A congressional probe was organized, and by April 2007, the hearings were underway.

Quote from the hearing: “In today's hearing, we will continue our investigation of the misinformation surrounding the death of one of those soldiers, Corporal Pat Tillman. We are focused on Corporal Tillman's case because the misinformation was so profound and because it persisted so long. And if that can happen to the most famous soldier serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, it leaves many families and many of us questioning the accuracy of the information from many other casualties.”

This is an incredibly pertinent statement as it relates to the Johnsons; LaVena’s death occurred only a year later, and her family was given loads of inconsistent and seemingly false information. By 2007, they were resorting to Freedom of Information Act requests to get access to the Army’s evidence in their daughter’s case.

The Tillman case, if indeed it was a deliberate attempt to spin a tragedy into the story of an American hero, established a pattern of lying and misinformation on the part of Army officials. Rep. Clay decided to use the Tillman congressional probe to put the Army on the spot about LaVena.

He brought up LaVena’s case, told the members of the hearing that her family had been met with nothing but a “wall of disrespect,” and asked the Army to turn over a copy of the CD that John Johnson was desperately trying to get his hands on. The Army representatives seemed cooperative during the televised hearing, but they quickly backpedaled off-camera and said that Johnson wasn’t entitled to the information on the CD. In the end, members of the congressional hearing had to order the United States Army to turn over the CD to Dr. Johnson, and the information it contained seemed to confirm his worst fears.

The disc contained the colored crime scene photos from LaVena’s murder. What Dr. Johnson saw would come to haunt him. With the help of his brother, who has a criminal science degree, they were able to determine from the photos that LaVena’s neck was almost certainly broken, and her shoulder was dislocated. Lividity, or the black and blue bruises caused by blood pooling in the body after death, had set in on the left side of her body, and this proved someone had moved her body postmortem.

Dr. Johnson saw photographs of bloody footprints in the dirt in front of the tent where his daughter was supposedly found, indicating someone had been bleeding outside the tent- perhaps a third party. His brother also told him that the evidence on the disk showed something had been shoved inside of her vagina, indicating a brutal sexual assault.

This was enough to convince the Johnson’s that they needed to have LaVena’s body exhumed and a new autopsy performed. So, two years after LaVena was laid to rest, the body was exhumed and an impartial 3rd party doctor, Dr. Michael Johnson, performed a second autopsy.

Contrary to the Army’s report, the second autopsy determined LaVena’s body did indeed show signs of a horrific sexual assault. Not only had part of her vagina been surgically removed, someone had poured a caustic substance, most likely acid or lye, all over her genitals. This was most likely done to hide any DNA evidence of an assault. The doctor found burns on her face, bruises on her body, and confirmed her neck was broken. Also, post-mortem reconstructive surgery had been performed to correct her broken nose. If this had been done to improve her appearance for an open casket, it would make sense, but the Army recommended the Johnsons have a closed casket funeral for their daughter. What reason would they have for performing a nose job after death unless they were trying to hide the fact that her nose was broken?

Unless LaVena had fallen down a mountain before she committed suicide, she was certainly attacked prior to her death.

“Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.” -Representative Jane Harmon

What the Johnsons did uncover through this horrific debacle was that LaVena was not the first female soldier to be raped in the military, nor was she the only one to die under suspicious circumstances following an attack. Dr. Johnson discovered a pattern of women service members dying under suspicious circumstances, with the Army declaring the deaths as suicide. One of those cases was the death of Tina Priest.

Tina Priest was 20-years-old and serving in Iraq in 2006. A fellow soldier had raped her, and she told her mother about it during one of their daily phone calls. Tina was angry and reported the man, and a few weeks later, she was found dead with a bullet hole in the left side of her skull. Just like LaVena, Tina was right-handed. The Army ruled her death a suicide.

Tina’s mother, Joy, refused to accept those findings and hounded the military for over a year to release the evidence to her. She told the LA Times, “They have you jump through hoops, then they back you up and make you jump through more,” Priest said. “It’s so painful -- just mind-bending.”

In 2005, the US military created the Sexual Assault and Response Office. They began publishing yearly sexual assault reports to gauge the magnitude of the problem, but these reports have hardly staved the issue. In 2006, the number of sexual assaults reported was 2,947. Just last year in 2020, there were 7,816 sexual assault complaints reported, but the actual number that occurred is believed to be over 20,000. Out of the almost 8,000 reported cases, charges were brought only 350 times. Most of the time, the reporters face retaliation because the attacks are perpetrated by fellow soldiers or commanders inside their own units, whom they are with 24/7. Victims feel like they have no good options for getting justice in these situations, so the overwhelming majority choose to say nothing. Sometimes they stay silent because, if LaVena Johnson and Tina Priest are any indications, their lives depend on it. (assault figures from the PBS article and the DoD sexual assault report)

Dr. Johnson has tried and failed to have the case reopened in spite of the inconsistencies between the evidence and the official version of what happened. In late 2007, he decided to go to the media with what he had to see if he could pressure authorities that way. The subsequent media attention helped galvanize public support behind the Johnsons. Numerous petitions to have the case looked into garnered thousands of signatures, including petitions sent to the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee. As I’ve already mentioned, a documentary came out in 2010 detailing the Johnson family’s story and numerous other suspicious female soldier deaths that have not received transparent investigative attention from the United States Army.

To this day, the military’s official stance on the LaVena Johnson case remains the same:

Statement from the U.S. Criminal Investigation Command on LaVena Johnson’s death:

“CID's extensive investigation found PFC LaVena Johnson's death to be from a self-inflicted gunshot. This finding coincides with the opinion rendered by the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, whose findings also determined the death to be from a self-inflicted gunshot. CID conducted a very thorough investigation, as well as a very thorough review of the case and stands by the findings of our investigation. As with all CID cases, if new information pertinent to this investigation becomes available, CID will reopen the investigation if warranted.” Per Jeffrey Castro, U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command - Public Affairs

In 2011, the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a sort of educational club composed of students from three southern colleges, began investigating LaVena’s case. Sheryl McCollum, the criminologist and professor who heads the institute, selected the case for review after Dr. Johnson contacted her. The organization usually reviews one case per year, but McCollum and her students spent three years looking at the evidence. In 2015, she released a statement that they neither confirmed nor disproved the military’s findings with the evidence at hand.

“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.’’

In spite of these findings, Dr. Johnson believes his daughter was raped and murdered by someone in her camp. They may have been a high-ranking officer or someone with clout, which is why the Army might be compelled to cover it up.

For at least the first five years after LaVena’s death, the Johnson family refused to celebrate Christmas; it was LaVena’s favorite time of year. The last thing she said to her mother was not to let her father decorate without her. It appears Linda Johnson kept her word.

The family still struggles with the loss of LaVena, but John Johnson vows to fight until his dying day to find out what happened.

“It will be a cold day in hell before I stop.”

In the eyes of the Johnsons and many others, the case of LaVena Johnson remains unresolved.

Episode Information

Research & writing by Maggie Coomer

Hosting & production by Micheal Whelan

Published on on July 31st, 2021

Producers: Roberta Janson, Travis Scsepko, Ben Krokum, Gabriella Bromley, Bryan Hall, Quil Carter, Steven Wilson, Laura Hannan, Jo Wong, Damion Moore, Scott Meesey, Astrid Kneier, Aimee McGregor, Sara Moscaritolo, Sydney Scotton, Thomas Ahearn, Marion Welsh, Patrick Laakso, Meadow Landry, Tatum Bautista, Denise Grogan, Teunia Elzinga, Sally Ranford, Rebecca O'Sullivan, Ryan Green, Jacinda Class, Stephanie Joyner, James Weis, Kevin McCracken, Brooke Bullek, Lauren Nicole, Shane Robinson, Matthew Traywick, Sara Rosario, and Stacey Houser