A Mississippi man is back to jail after he allegedly murdered his ex-girlfriend whose mutilated body was found wrapped in a sheet in a Gulfport cemetery earlier this week.
22-year-old Lauren Johansen’s body was discovered by officers conducting a wellness check at the cemetery.
Her ex-boyfriend, 23-year-old Bricen Rivers, was arrested hours later on Wednesday following a manhunt.
Rivers had just bonded out of jail after a judge reduced his bond from $250,000 to $150,000 in connection to a December kidnapping and assault incident involving Johansen.
The victim and Rivers were on vacation when he beat her to the point she almost lost consciousness, court records revealed.
“I sat in the courtroom in Nashville and told the judge that if they let him out, he was going to kill her,” the victim’s father Lance Johansen said.
“He had assaulted her – this was probably the fifth or sixth time where they would get into a fight and he would beat her,”
“We would get her away from him for a while, but he would find a way to weasel back in it.”
