Less than 10 days after a Tennessee judge allowed bond for a man charged with brutally beating his ex-girlfriend, the man was back behind bars, and the woman was dead.
And Lauren Johansen’s father is furious.
“They knew he was a psychopath; they knew he was going to kill her if he got out,” Dr. Lance Johansen said, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
“I warned them how this was going to play out, and they went ahead and did it anyway.”
The defendant in the case is Bricen Rivers, who is now charged with murder in Lauren Johansen’s death, according to WDAM-TV.
Rivers, 23, and Johansen, 22, had been a couple in high school in Gulfport, Mississippi, according to the Daily Mail, but Johansen wanted to move on when she went to college at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Rivers, however, wasn’t willing to let go and stalked her for years, Johansen’s family explained.
Johansen apparently decided to reconcile with him, though, and in December, the couple went to Nashville on a vacation together.
It was a decision Johansen would have cause to regret.
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In a drunken rage, according to the Daily Mail, Rivers beat her bloody in a rental vehicle. He was arrested after his own mother alerted authorities upon hearing screaming in the background during a phone call.
She’d been “severely beaten, her eye was swollen shut and she also had a severe laceration to her forehead,” according to a police report.
Bond was initially set at $250,000, according to the Daily Mail, but after an April hearing, Nashville Judge Cheryl Blackburn reduced it to $150,000. Rivers’ family managed to get him out, with the help of two local bail bondsman companies.
Those companies are now under fire for not ensuring the terms of his release were met, according to WZTV-DT in Nashville.
At the time, according to the Daily Mail, Rivers was also facing numerous charges in Mississippi, including auto burglary and possessing and trafficking a controlled substance, but he’d apparently not been convicted yet. Arrests without convictions would not be counted as evidence of criminal history, according to a spokesman for the Davidson County, Tennessee, District Attorney’s Office. (Nashville is in Davidson County.)
He was released June 24, according to the Daily Mail. By July 2, Lauren Johansen, a nursing student, was dead, the victim of an appallingly brutal act of violence.
Bricen Rivers, 23, of Mississippi has been charged with murder after he a fled a Gulfport cemetery where police found the body of his ex-girlfriend, Lauren Johansen, 22, mutilated & wrapped in a sheet inside a car
Rivers evaded police for hours until his capture after a manhunt pic.twitter.com/8YMZgO1sQX
— True Crime Updates (@TrueCrimeUpdat) July 6, 2024
👿Bricen Rivers. 23, is facing first-degree murder, grand larceny auto and tampering with evidence charges#ThemFolkshttps://t.co/B000mWgcyA pic.twitter.com/1lq0oSJoON
— J.B. Freedmen (@JayeB62620916) July 28, 2024
“I can’t explain to you the beating that this man did to my daughter,” Lance Johansen said at Rivers’ bail hearing on Friday, according to WDAM.
“He beat her so badly that her skull and her face pretty much became fractured from the rest of her body.
“He basically beat her until the front of her head came off. No human being deserves to have this happen to them.”
According to the Daily Mail, an assistant at the office of the judge who lowered Rivers’ bail had nothing to say.
“It’s a no comment,” the assistant said. “The office as a whole has no comment.”
At Friday’s hearing, unbelievably, Rivers was asked if he was out on bail at the time of the July 2 murder, and he responded, “No, not to my knowledge,” according to WDAM.
For Lance Johansen, that statement showed Rivers was a “pathological liar.”
“He misled the judge there before, and I think the bottom line is, you cannot take a criminal’s word for saying the right thing, because this man is a pathological liar,” he said.
