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A mother fights for answers
By YVETTE OROZCO
Updated: 04.05.10
Sandy Johnson waited nearly two years to place a marker on her son’s grave.
She dreaded the reason why, but knew it was inevitable.
The March 23 exhumation of Hank Johnson’s body from Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery in Houston will hopefully lead to clues regarding his death. Blood samples obtained will be taken to the Galveston County morgue and results could take weeks or months.
But the exhumation was just the beginning of the next chapter in Sandy Johnson’s long search into the reasons behind the death of her only son on July 10, 2008.
“I don’t trust them,” she said of the Robertson County officials who ordered the exhumation after two years of trying to claim the case shut.
The Pasadena-area resident has been trying to find answers since the day her son was found beaten and near death in his Central Texas hotel room.
Blood found underneath Hank Johnson’s fingernails was never examined by authorities in Hearn, a city in Robertson County, where the 27-year-old welder had gone to work on a power plant nearly two years ago. Items were missing from the hotel room where he was staying. His girlfriend found him near death.
For 12 days, he would lie comatose and dying in an area hospital until Johnson had to make the choice to remove her son from life support. She dressed and buried him then, and on March 29 she dressed and buried him again.
Since his death, Johnson has become a one-woman crusade to get authorities in Robertson County to listen. But those officials have so far shut her out. When she called and left messages repeatedly about the visible blood stains on her son’s fingernails, while he was in a coma and now, nearly two years later, when she places those officials in the glare of the media spotlight.
“The D.A.’s office kept telling me to leave them alone, that there was no case,” Johnson said.
Robertson County District Attorney John Paschall, who was the prosecutor in the case, has not answered those calls nor has chief investigator Brian Bancroft.
“They’re still being very quiet,” said Johnson’s attorney, Ty Clevenger.
With the DA’s brother-in-law cited in the investigation as having knowledge of her son’s beating, Johnson questions if Paschall has a conflict of interest in the case. Clevenger said Paschall sent a letter to him personally stating that a polygraph confirmed that his brother-in-law had nothing to do with the murder, but refused to provide any record of such evidence.
“We’ve even asked for the financial records verifying that they had a polygraph examiner do this, but they’re saying they can’t produce any,” Clevenger said. “That tells me it never happened.”
The original investigator in the case has since been demoted from sergeant to night patrolmen on the graveyard shift, having been removed from the case by Paschall. Clevenger believes authorities exhumed the body only when prompted by negative media attention.
“None of that happened until the press really started pushing the story,” he said.
Clevenger has requested the involvement of the FBI and the Texas Attorney General’s Office into the case. Authorities from the Hearn Police Department and Robertson County District Attorney’s Office were unavailable for comment.
At Johnson’s request, the funeral home did not clean the blood from Hank’s fingernails for the same reason his grave was not given a marker.
“I never ordered his stone because I knew that they were going to do this, I just felt it, but I didn’t think it would be 12 months,” she said. “The next time I wanted to see my son was in Heaven.”
Hank Johnson worked as a welder for Fiberglass Specialists in Pasadena, but grew up, said his mother, with the sensitivity of an artist. Whether he was playing his guitar or letting children chase him around as a member of his mother’s puppet theater troupe in Pasadena, he was an original.
He also left two young children.
When news of his exhumation was shown on TV, now 6-year-old Lily Johnson immediately recognized her father.
“She pointed at the TV and said, ‘That’s my daddy!’” Johnson said. “She knows what is happening and she asks, ‘Why would anybody want to hurt my daddy? My daddy was so funny.’”
Challenging authorities in Robertson County has consumed Johnson’s life for almost two years and, until she gets answers, her son’s death remains an open case and an open wound. Identifying her son’s murderers will not bring him back, she said, but can begin the chapter of healing.
“They’ve got to be prosecuted, they’ve got to be put in jail,” Johnson said.
Hank Johnson’s body was exhumed and reburied the same day. His mother watched as his body was lifted, and then lowered for the second time.
“I think that was the hardest part of this,” she said. “Taking my son’s clothes to the funeral home is something that is unnatural and doing (it) twice is devastating. They have a word for a man who loses his wife, or for a woman who loses her husband, but they have no words for a parent who loses a child. There is too much pain to describe it.”
Johnson finally ordered the marker for her son’s grave, one week after he would have turned 29 in March. The text is simple: Hank Alan Johnson, Beloved Father. underneath those words, Johnson chose the title of her son’s favorite song as the centerpiece to his epitaph, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “A Simple Man.”
“Mama told me when I was young,
“Come sit beside me, my only son.
“Be something you love and understand,
“Be a simple kind of man.”
It was the last song Sandy Johnson heard her son play on the guitar. She didn’t understand the personal significance until later.
“When I actually listened to the song’s lyrics, I realized it was about a mother telling her son to be good,” she said. “Now that song always gets me, it just gets me.”
http://www.hcnonline.com/articles/2010/04/05/pasadena_citizen/news/040410_sandy_johnson.txt