Friday, July 12, 2024 - A 22-year-old college student was found b3aten to death and wrapped in a sheet in the backseat of her car days after her father warned a judge that if her boyfriend was let out of jail, he would kill her.
Lauren Johansen’s b0dy was discovered mutilated and wrapped
in trash bags and a sheet on July 3 in the Wolf River Cemetery in Harrison
County days after her boyfriend, who was detained for assaulting her, was
released on bond.
Her father says that the man charged in her murder,
boyfriend Bricen Rivers, had just bonded out of jail days earlier after he was
held for aggravated kidnapping for brutally beating her and holding her hostage
during a December trip to Nashville.
"You can see what happened when he hit her 100 times
back in December so just imagine what he did to her when nobody was around to
save her," her father, Lance Johansen, told the Daily Mail following
his daughter's brutal murder.
"I sat in the courtroom in Nashville and told the judge that if they let him out, he was going to kill her," the slain student’s father, Lance Johansen, told WLOX.
"He had assaulted her — this was probably the fifth or
sixth time where they would get into a fight and he would beat her."
Rivers, 23, faces a murder charge and is being held on a $1
million bond.
He was arrested last Thursday, July 4, following a six-hour
manhunt, NOLA.com reported.
Lauren Johansen, who was originally from Gulfport, was
attending the University of Southern Mississippi to get a nursing degree, her
father, who is an orthopaedic surgeon, said.
The 22-year-old was first reported missing early July 2 when
her sister woke up alone in their shared Hattiesburg apartment with the front
door wide open and their security camera smashed.
Lance Johansen
That same morning, her father woke up to a notification that
her Life360, a location-tracking app, had been turned off.
He reported her missing to the Hattiesburg Police Department
and the next day, officers informed him that they located her car in a nearby
cemetery.
"I knew she was dead," Lance Johansen told WLOX,
detailing how she was found wrapped up in trash bags in the backseat of her
car.
"She was basically beaten to death. Her face was smashed
in, her head was smashed in, she was brutally beaten to the point she couldn’t
see out of either eye when she finally died and there were multiple h0les in
her head," he said.
He continued: "I helped the coroner lift her body out
of the car. It was just mutilated."
The heartbroken father slammed the criminal justice system in Tennessee for failing his family, saying Rivers’ bond should have never been reduced.
Rivers, who initially was held on $251,000, had his bond
lowered to $150,000 after he had been in jail for seven months.
Before Rivers’ arrest in December 2023, police officers
found Lauren Johansen badly beaten and trying to escape a rental vehicle as
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," the bereaved father told WLOX.
"She was really beautiful, super, super smart. She had
dreams and hopes that were larger than life. Everything she did, everything she
touched."
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