The mother of Riley Strain, the University of Missouri student whose body was pulled from a river in Nashville, said she received a text from her the night she disappeared, saying her drink tasted strange.
Michelle Whiteyd shared a message from her son on March 8th that she still remembers. NewsNation interview on tuesday.
Strain, 22, said he ordered a rum and coke during a night out in Music City with his fraternity brothers, but he texted to say it “didn’t taste good.”
Ms Whyid said she told him he probably shouldn’t drink it.
Then he “tasted like barbecue,” his mother told the news station.
“I said, ‘That’s awful,'” she said. “He said, ‘That sounds good, but it’s not.’
A seemingly mundane email left Whyid with serious questions after her son disappeared after being kicked out of a downtown bar, Luke’s 32 Bridge Food and Drink, later that night.
“Maybe there was something in it that wasn’t supposed to be in it,” she told NewsNation about the drink.
Witnesses and surveillance footage said her son was seen stumbling around and appearing “very intoxicated” after being thrown out of the bar.
Strain’s body was found in the Cumberland River in West Nashville on March 22, less than two weeks after she disappeared. He had lost the pants, belt, wallet and cowboy boots he had been wearing earlier that night.
Investigators have ruled out foul play and a preliminary autopsy report lists his death as an accident, but the college student’s family says they have doubts.
“If he really fell into the water, if you can prove it to me, show me. I’ll accept it,” stepfather Chris Whiteyd told NewsNation.
“But I can tell you from everything we’ve searched and searched and photographed, I don’t think that actually happened. He may have fallen, but someone rescued him from the water,” he said.
Strain’s family requested a second autopsy after finding there was no water in his lungs, as is often the case in drowning cases.
