Harrison County Sheriff’s Department
A 22-year-old college student from Mississippi was found beaten to death and wrapped in a sheet in the backseat of her car last week — days after her father warned a judge that if her boyfriend was let out of jail he would kill her.
Lauren Johansen’s body was discovered mutilated and wrapped in trash bags and a sheet on July 3 in the Wolf River Cemetery in Harrison County, news station WLOX reported.
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.
“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, now 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 is originally from Gulfport, was attending the University of Southern Mississippi to get a nursing degree, said her father, who is an orthopedic surgeon.
The 22-year-old was first reported missing early the morning of July 2 when her sister woke up alone in their shared Hattiesburg apartment with the front door wide open and their security camera smashed.
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 was multiple holes 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.
In the moments leading to Rivers’ December arrest, 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,” he 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.”