Rather than showing how their 17-year-old son's body ended up in a school gym mat in January, the four cameras inside the Valdosta, Georgia, gymnasium showed only a few collective seconds of Johnson, jogging. The camera fixed on the gym mats was blurry.
Compounding the family's suspicions was the nature of the gym videos. They're jumpy, with students intermittently appearing and vanishing, and they bear no obvious timestamps.
The Johnsons' attorneys were not shy in stating their suspicion that someone could have tampered with the videos.
"They know their child did not climb into a wrestling mat, get stuck and die. Where is that video?" Benjamin Crump asked.
Attorney Chevene King questioned why time codes weren't shown in the videos.
"We don't have any time code with which to synchronize the events that are shown in the video. ... Either the cameras did this on their own or a human being interacted to make these cameras do these things," King said.
Crump further said the family believes someone "corrupted" the video.
Lowndes County Schools insists the video is "a raw feed with no edits," and the Lowndes County Sheriff's Office, which asserts Johnson accidentally died while reaching for a shoe in one of the mats, says it didn't edit any files, according to their lawyers.
CNN, which filed suit to secure access to the video, hired forensic video analyst Grant Fredericks to analyze more than 290 hours of material from all 35 cameras inside and outside of the gym. Fredericks is a U.S. Justice Department consultant and contract instructor for the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
CNN also provided Fredericks and his company, the Spokane, Washington-based Forensic Video Solutions, with hundreds more hours of video from 31 cameras in other parts of Lowndes County High School.
Fredericks quickly knocked down the Johnsons' concerns -- they're all easily explained, he said -- but his examination raised what could be another mystery: at least an hour of missing video from all four cameras inside the gym.
"Those files are not original files," Fredericks said. "They're not something investigators should rely on for the truth of the video."
Addressing the Johnsons' suspicions, Fredericks said the erratic motion in the video can be attributed to motion sensors triggering the cameras' recording function, and the blurriness on the camera homing in on the gym mats is the product of an out-of-focus lens. As for the time stamp, it's there; investigators just need to know where to look, he said.
Fredericks was able to find a little more than 18 minutes of video showing Johnson throughout the school on January 10. He's first seen at 7:31 a.m. entering school and last seen at 1:09 p.m., walking into the gym where he was found dead the next day.
What Fredericks wasn't able to find was video showing whether there was anyone in the gym when Johnson was there -- images that could prove vital in determining how the teen died.
"(The surveillance video has) been altered in a number of ways, primarily in image quality and likely in dropped information, information loss," he said. "There are also a number of files that are corrupted because they've not been processed correctly and they're not playable. I can't say why they were done that way, but they were not done correctly, and they were not done thoroughly. So we're missing information."
Two cameras in the gym are missing an hour and five minutes, their hiatus ending at 1:09, when Johnson enters the gym. Another pair of cameras are missing two hours and 10 minutes each. They don't begin recording again until 1:15 and 1:16, according to their time stamps.
What's certain, based on video from a camera outside the gym, is that numerous students walked into the gym during the hour and five minutes that the cameras weren't recording, but it's not clear whether that was sufficient to activate the cameras' motion sensors.
The time stamp on a camera outside the gym also appears to be 10 minutes behind the cameras inside the gym.
"I can't tell you whether there was no information recorded in the digital video system or whether somebody made an error and didn't capture it or whether somebody just didn't provide it," Fredericks said.
CNN has requested access to the original surveillance servers. But Fredericks cautions that the video could be gone, as newer surveillance would replace it if it wasn't recovered promptly from the school's digital video recorder.
The police have said they didn't receive a copy of the videos until several days after Johnson's body was found, according to an unredacted report obtained by CNN after a legal process.
Fredericks told CNN he found it "highly suspicious" that an hour of video could be missing, especially considering how the material was acquired by police.
"The investigator's responsibility is to acquire the entire digital video recording system and have their staff define what they want to obtain," he said.
According to an incident report from the Sheriff's Office, however, a detective watched a portion of the video then asked an information technology officer employed by the school board to produce a "copy of the surveillance video for the entire wing of the school with the old gym for the last 48 hours."
Five days later, the sheriff's report says, the IT officer delivered a hard drive to the detective, who verified it contained what he requested.
"Right now, what they've done, is they've left it up to the school district as to what it is they want to provide to the police, and I think that probably is a mistake," Fredericks said.
"You don't want somebody who might be party to the responsibility to make the decision as to what they provide the police."
He added, "Until I have the digital video system in my hand and I can say, or an investigator can say, 'Everything is intact, and this is what was recorded,' I would still be highly suspicious of this."
The Johnson family will now have to wait to see whether the school's surveillance servers shed more light on their son's death, but the teen's parents say they won't be deterred.
"We are Kendrick Johnson," his mother, Jacquelyn Johnson, said. "That's my child, and we're going to fight until it's all over, until we get the truth. That's all we've ever asked for -- was the truth about what happened to Kendrick Johnson."
In a scathing report recently obtained by CNN, the coroner in the case of a Georgia teen found dead inside a rolled-up gym mat blasted how the initial investigation was handled.
Authorities say Kendrick Johnson fell into the mat and suffocated while trying to retrieve a sneaker. His family suspects the 17-year-old was murdered and that someone has tried to cover up evidence in the case.
"I was not notifedi n (sic) this death until 15:45 hours. The investigative climate was very poor to worse when I arrived on the scene. The body had been noticably (sic) moved. The scene had been compromised and there was no cooperation from law enforcement at the scene. Furthermore the integrity of the evidence bag was compromised on January 13, 2013 by opening the sealed bag and exhibiting the dead body to his father," wrote Lowndes County Coroner Bill Watson in a report dated January 22.
"I do not approve of the manner this case was handled. Not only was the scene compromised, the body was moved. The integrrety (sic) was breached by opening a sealed body bag, information necessary for my lawful investigation was withheld," he said.
The coroner's death investigation report was obtained by CNN through an open records request directed at the coroner's office.
A second coroner's death investigation report was provided by the Lowndes County Sheriff's Office.
The second report, which is not signed nor dated, is not nearly as critical as the first.
"I was not called by investigating officers regarding this death until the afore listed time of notification," it read.
It was not immediately clear why there were two coroner's reports. The inconsistencies between them were also not clear.
When contacted by CNN, a lawyer for the Lowndes County sheriff and the Lowndes County coroner declined to address specific questions about the reports.
"In light of the US attorney's review of this matter, the Lowndes County sheriff and the Lowndes County coroner will not comment further on this case. They will fully cooperate and respond to all inquiries of the United States attorney," Jim Elliott wrote in an e-mail.
The U.S. attorney's office in Macon, Georgia, opened an investigation into the case last week.
While warning his jurisdiction is limited as a federal prosecutor, Michael Moore, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, said that after a lengthy review of evidence collected by authorities and the family's own investigator, "sufficient basis exists" to warrant a formal review of the facts.
A Georgia judge on Thursday ruled that pending the outcome of that review, he will decide whether to order a coroner's inquest. Johnson's parents had asked for the inquest. A lawyer for them said they would appeal.
Family questions video oddities
*Covered in "Missing Video"
Also Thursday, lawyers for Johnson's family raised questions about apparent discrepancies in newly released surveillance images, including missing time codes, gaps and a mysteriously blurry and out-of-position camera that should have been pointed right at the spot where authorities found Johnson's body some 10 months ago.
The surveillance images were provided by authorities after a judge ruled they must be released.
For instance, in one image, a man seen walking away from the gym in what appears to be an image captured late at night suddenly disappears from a series of images shot by a motion-activated camera. Other images shot at other times capture people walking in that same location, attorney Chevene King said.
In another example, King showed reporters images from a camera that he said should have shown the place where authorities say Johnson fell into a gym mat and suffocated. The image was blurry and out of position, he said.
While stopping short of directly accusing authorities of deliberately tampering with the evidence, King said problems with the surveillance are only the latest in a series of oddities that have drawn national attention to Johnson's death. His bloody body was found rolled up in a mat at Lowndes High School on January 11.
A state medical examiner ruled his death accidental, despite evidence of a neck injury found in a second autopsy conducted by a pathologist hired by the family. His fingernails had been clipped, his clothes were missing and his organs had been removed and replaced by newspaper.
"We have had what I think is a series of events that causes you to raise the question, when does a coincidence stop being a coincidence," King told reporters Wednesday in Valdosta, Georgia.
King demanded that authorities hand over originals of the surveillance video showing time codes and other evidence that he said could show whether the materials had been tampered with.
Elliott, the attorney for Lowndes County Sheriff Chris Prine, said that his client has confirmed the video had not been altered or edited by anyone within the sheriff's office. An attorney for the school likewise said that what was provided to the sheriff's office was the raw feed with no edits.
Kendrick's father, Kenneth Johnson, angrily demanded justice, calling authorities corrupt and vowing the family will not stop until they get answers to what happened to his son.
"The Lowndes County Sheriff's Department, the D.A.'s office, they convict people all the time inside this courthouse," he said. "Should they not be held responsible for the lies they are telling and for the corruption?"
This is all extremely eerie. I know it's a bit older, but it wasn't posted here and I haven't heard much about it. CNN also seems to be the only major news outlet following the story.