The mother of Riley Strain — the University of Missouri student whose body was pulled from a river in Nashville — said he texted her about his drink tasting odd on the night he disappeared.
Michelle Whiteid shared the now-haunting March 8 messages from her son in an interview with NewsNation on Tuesday.
Strain, 22, had texted her that he ordered a rum and coke but it “didn’t taste good” during a night out in the Music City with his fraternity brothers, she said.
Whiteid said she told him he probably shouldn’t drink it.
He then said it tasted “like barbecue,” the mom recounted to the news station.
“I go, ‘Well that sounds awful,’” she said. “He said, ‘Well, it sounds good, but it’s not.”
After her son was kicked out of a downtown bar, Luke’s 32 Bridge Food + Drink, later that night and vanished, the seemingly mundane texts have left Whiteid with serious questions.
“Maybe there was something in it that shouldn’t have been,” she told NewsNation of the drink.
Her son was seen by witnesses and surveillance footage stumbling around and appearing “very, very intoxicated” after he was thrown from the bar.
Strain’s body was discovered in the Cumberland River in West Nashville on March 22, less than two weeks after he vanished. He was missing his pants, belt, wallet and cowboy boots he had been wearing earlier in the night.
Though investigators have ruled out foul play and a preliminary autopsy report lists his death as accidental, the college student’s family members say they have doubts.
“If he fell and truly fell in the water, and you can prove that to me, show me. I’ll accept it,” his stepfather Chris Whiteid said to NewsNation.
“But I can tell you from all the stuff that we’ve done as far as search and looking, taking pictures — I don’t feel like it’s really possible that happened. He may have fallen, but someone helped him in the water,” he said.
The family has requested a second autopsy after it was revealed that Strain had no water in his lungs, as is typical in drowning cases.
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