22-year-old Lauren Johansen was found dead in her own car in a Mississippi cemetery on Wednesday. She had been “mutilated” and wrapped in sheets and trash bags.
This was discovered days after the woman’s ex-boyfriend bonded out of jail in Nashville, Tennessee, without an ankle monitor, despite her family’s insistence in court that her life would be in danger if he remained in custody.
In an emotional interview with the local ABC and CBS station WLOX, Lauren’s father Lance Johansen related this sequence of events. According to the orthopedic surgeon, the family pleaded with a Nashville judge to keep 23-year-old Bricen Rivers in jail, but the judge granted his release, and as a result, his daughter was slain.
In December 2023, Lance claimed to have appeared in court and begged Judge Cheryl Blackburn to keep Rivers in custody in connection with an ongoing case involving aggravated kidnapping, aggravated stalking, and coercion of a witness. Lance claimed to be confident that the defendant “was going to kill” Lauren, the victim in the ongoing case.
Blackburn reduced Rivers’ bond from $250,000 to $150,000, according court records, despite local defense attorneys having questioned Blackburn’s competency in recent months.
A few days prior to Johansen’s passing, the defendant was apparently freed; the prosecution allegedly objected to the bond being lowered. The precise date of the defendant’s release is unknown.
After reportedly disobeying orders to remain in Davidson County, Tennessee, and to obtain an ankle monitor, Rivers was taken into custody and accused with killing Lauren Johansen across state lines.
“This is Bailey calling from the district attorney’s office in Nashville. Bricen Rivers was released from custody. He was supposed to report straight to a GPS company and be put on a GPS monitor and he was not to leave Davidson County,” according to the recording aired on the news stated. “But as soon as he was released, he did not report to that GPS monitoring company, and he has not been heard from. I wanted to make sure Lauren is safe.”
It appears that by then, it was almost too late to save Lauren. The father claimed to have texted Lauren and received an unidentifiable response. Subsequently, during the wee hours of July 2, he noticed that Lauren’s Life360 location sharing app had disabled its tracking feature.
From then on, the narrative just grew worse.
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Lance said that as soon as he discovered that the front door of the house where Lauren resided with her sister was open, that the security camera had stopped working, and that Lauren and her car were missing, he reported his daughter missing to the Hattiesburg police.
The bereaved father claimed that he knew Lauren was dead by the time Lauren’s car was located in Harrison County on Wednesday afternoon, “the middle of the cemetery,” by using OnStar.
However, he was unprepared for what he saw after that.
“When we got there, her car was in the middle of the cemetery and she was in the back of the car wrapped up in sheets and trash bags. She was basically beaten to death,” Lance Johansen stated. “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. I helped the coroner lift her body out of the car. It was just mutilated.”
“Everything she did, everything she touched turned to gold — except for this guy,” he continued.
When police allegedly arrived at the cemetery, Rivers allegedly fled, and some hours later, he was apprehended in the woods.
According to jail documents, Rivers was arrested shortly after midnight on July 4 and given a $1,000,000 bond.
