VALDOSTA — The Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office has reopened the Kendrick Johnson case.

After two years of requests, Lowndes County Sheriff Ashley Paulk has received previously unreleased documents from the Department of Justice, officially reopening the Kendrick Johnson case.

The body of Kendrick “K.J.” Johnson was found upside down in a vertically stored gym mat at Lowndes High School in January 2013. A state autopsy ruled the 17-year-old’s death accidental, and a federal review of the case ended in 2016 when the Department of Justice announced it had not found “sufficient evidence to support federal criminal charges.”

The Johnson family has maintained their son died of foul play and have filed multiple lawsuits against dozens of defendants through the years.

Paulk said the Johnson family was instrumental in helping obtain the documents.

There are 17 boxes of materials, computers and hard drives that will require a lot of time and manpower to review, Paulk said Monday evening.

The Lowndes County Sheriffs Office will take the information and compare it to previous findings, searching for any discrepancies.

“We are confident in what (we) will come up with will be the truth,” Paulk said.

Given the amount of information, Paulk said he doesn’t have a timeline for how long this may take but that he is heading it up himself.

The documents that have been released are sealed for law-enforcement use only by order of a judge, meaning no information from the documents will be released.