Staff writer Christopher Seward contributed to this report
It could be several weeks before authorities receive the final medical examiner’s report on Jasmine Benjamin, the Valdosta State University freshman whose death is being treated as a homicide.
But they’re not willing to wait that long to try and figure out what happened to the effervescent 17-year-old from Lawrenceville.
“Until we get that autopsy report in hand, we’re a little reluctant to definitively call it murder,” Valdosta Police Department Commander Brian Childress told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday. “But could that change before we get the report? Absolutely. We’re waiting on the M.E.’s report to have a cause of death, but if our ongoing investigation clearly identifies it as a homicide, we’ll be willing to say that sooner.”
The absence of other students during the long holiday weekend has slowed the investigation, which Childress said would “start rolling again [Monday].” But that probably won’t lessen the sense of shock and loss for Benjamin’s family, who only a week ago were happily anticipating the Central Gwinnett High School graduate’s return home for Thanksgiving dinner and Black Friday shopping.
Around 4:30 p.m. last Sunday, Lawrenceville police informed Judith Brogdon and James Jackson, Jasmine’s mother and stepfather, that she was dead. The aspiring nurse had last spoken to her parents two days earlier, on Friday Nov. 16. The couple said close friends told them they also saw her that night. She was found Sunday afternoon on a couch in Georgia Hall, unresponsive. Lowndes County coroner Bill Watson told local media the teenager may have been dead for 12 to 15 hours. Authorities initially believed Jasmine died of natural causes, which is what her parents said they were told later Sunday.
Subsequently, Childress explained, “The M.E. provided us with information that created some concern.” He wouldn’t reveal what that information was, only that it “concerned us in a way that we believe may make it a homicide. As with any death case we are treating as a homicide, we are interviewing people and collecting evidence.”
Services for Jasmine Benjamin are scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday, at Levett & Sons Funeral Home’s Gwinnett Chapel, 914 Scenic Highway, Lawrenceville.
Anyone with information about her death is asked to call Valdosta State University police at 229-333-7815 or the Valdosta police crime hotline at 229-293-3091.
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