The body of 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson was exhumed after his parents hired a doctor to perform a second autopsy, revealing their sons organs were missing and replaced with newspaper.
ABC7 News reports Kendrick's parents authorized Doctor Bill Anderson to conduct an independent second autopsy. Anderson's report revealed investigators who performed the first autopsy were incorrect about their son's cause of death.
The doctor said Kendrick died "as the result of a blow to the neck, and not accidental asphyxia after slipping into a rolled gym mat at school as investigators in Georgia had said," according to ABC7 News.
What left Anderson most shocked was that all of Kendrick's organs were missing.
"When we got the body for the second autopsy, the organs - the heart, lungs, liver etc. - were not with the body," Anderson said. "The brain. They were all absent."
Kendrick's body was under the custody of two places: Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which conducted the first autopsy in January, and Harrington Funeral Home, where he was prepared for burial. The GBI said organs were placed back into the body after the autopsy.
According to the Associated Press, the Johnson family has enlisted the help of Tallahassee, Fla.-based attorney Benjamin Crump to help bring justice to their son. Crump is the lawyer who helped focus national attention on the death of Trayvon Martin.
"This is a real-life murder mystery where these parents sent their child to school with a book bag and he was returned to them in a body bag," Crump told AP. "They brought me in to make sure this is not able to be swept under the rug in small-town Georgia and they never get justice for their child."
GBI spokeswoman Sherry Lang told AP the agency defends the medical examiners who performed the autopsy on Kendrick's body.
"We have an excellent team of medical examiners, and we stand by them 100 percent," Lang said.
Warning: video contains photos of graphic evidence.
