U of I Student Accused of Suffocating Her Newborn, Putting Baby in Her Backpack

Lindsay Johnson is the girl "you want your kids to hang out with." She's a smart girl, a good kid, raised in a small town by good people on the family farm. She loves tractor pulls, country music and horses. She plays trumpet in the marching band.

One evening last month, police found her, a 20-year-old University of Illinois sophomore, on campus with a dead newborn baby boy in her backpack.

Her baby.

That afternoon, Johnson had given birth while locked in the bathroom of her college dormitory, Bousfield Hall. Another student, worried Johnson had been in the dorm bathroom for hours, summoned campus police to the dorm. Johnson told the officers she was suffering a bout of stomach flu, nothing more, and didn't need help.

Police left. But they were called again because Johnson's dorm-mate believed something else was wrong. She'd heard groaning and a baby's cries. And when police returned at 7:30 p.m. on March 13, according to authorities, they found blood in the bathroom.

And Johnson was gone.

Police began a search and found her, wearing her backpack, near the Music Building. She told them she was walking to Carle Hospital in Urbana.

Officers looked inside the backpack and found the dead newborn. They took Johnson to the police station where, they say, she told them a story.

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She didn't know she was pregnant, and only when childbirth began did she realize what was happening. Her friends later would tell investigators they had no idea Johnson was with child. They thought she had put on a few pounds and was wearing baggy sweatpants. She went to classes, practiced with the band, and spent a lot of time with her boyfriend, they said.

Johnson told police the baby was dead upon birth.

But the young woman knew she was pregnant, according to Champaign County prosecutors, who said a review of her phone and internet search records would later show she began Googling information about pregnancy, miscarriages and home abortions since September of 2015.

An autopsy also would prove her baby was alive and breathing when he entered this world.

And crying, too, as at least one fellow resident of Bousfield Hall will attest. When confronted with this statement, prosecutors said, Johnson told investigators she may have held her hand or a towel over the baby's mouth. Prosecutors said she hid the baby's body under her dorm-room bed the first time police came to talk to her.

The autopsy did not determine a cause of death. More results will be forthcoming.

Still, prosecutors, who believe she suffocated her newborn, had enough evidence to charge Lindsay Johnson in the infant's demise. About a month after the birth and death of the baby who was laid to rest as Robert Johnson, she was formally accused of murder and a warrant for her arrest was issued on Monday.

When she was booked, jail staff snapped her booking mug. As she stood before the judge, news photographers took her photograph. They did so again as she walked out of the courthouse, her parents, Richard and Andrea Johnson, right behind her. In each photograph, their daughter looks very much like everyone describes her — a kid.

A terrified kid. So very different from the portrait taken when she was awarded the Dick McHugh Memorial Scholarship before enrolling at the University of Illinois to study agricultural communications. Standing on a farmhouse front porch, smiling, confident, looking forward to life after Peotone High School, earning an education and beginning the life of an adult.

No one in Monee where she grew up or Peotone High School or her friends in the Future Farmers of America would suspect Johnson capable of ending a life. Certainly not her mom and dad.

"This is serious and tragic. ... The parents are dealing with this situation as well as anyone could be expected to," her lawyer, Tony Bruno, told the Champaign News-Gazette after the arraignment. "They are holding it together."

If convicted, their daughter faces 20 to 60 years in prison.

Bruno told the Chicago Tribune the case is "complicated."

"There is much we still need to investigate and we intend to vigorously do so, to try to achieve justice on her behalf," Bruno said.

Much like the photographers who camp outside the courtroom for photos of the accused, circumstances like this compel big-city newspapers to dispatch a reporter to find friends and family willing to answer questions and offer reaction. And Johnson's alleged crime brought them to little Monee, Illinois, home to 5,000 people, 37 miles due south of Chicago, near I-57, where farmland meets suburbia.

"I was shocked," Tammy Cowger told the Tribune. Cowger's son and Johnson were high school classmates. "She's one of those kids you would want your kids to hang out with.

"She was just like your typical high-school girl."

The legal process expected to unfold will be long and arduous. Regardless of what happens, life for Lindsay Johnson will be anything but typical.