Baller Alert Entertainment & Lifestyle
LaSalle County Coroner Richard Ploch announced on Monday that 25-year-old Jelani Day’s cause of death was drowning, however, “the manner in which Mr. Day went into the Illinois River is currently unknown.” The graduate student’s body was discovered in the Illinois River last month.
He was last seen on Aug. 24 at a cannabis dispensary and was reported missing the next day. Day’s body was identified “through forensic dental identification and DNA testing and comparison.”
The coroner stated during the press conference yesterday that “there was no evidence of any (pre-death) injury, such as manual strangulation, an assault or altercation, sharp, blunt, or gunshot injury, infection, tumor, natural disease, congenital abnormality, or significant drug intoxication.”
Day’s car was discovered about 60 miles from Illinois State University, just one day after he was reported missing in Peru, Illinois. Inside the car, officials discovered the clothing Day was last seen wearing.
Bloomington Police Officer John Fermon said that Day’s case “was unusual” immediately” from a police aspect.
“Usually when we have missing persons or runaways there is usually a story behind why they ran away,” he said. “They might have had marital issues or they just wanted to get away. He was close with his family. He was attending ISU. There wasn’t an underlying explanation as to why he went missing.” He continued, “Usually there is an underlying reason why they go missing and there wasn’t for Jelani. He just went missing and that is why we are trying to determine the circumstances around him going missing.”
According to reports, his family and fraternity have recently pleaded with the FBI to take up his case. The Nu Epsilon chapter of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity at Alabama A&M University, where Day was a graduate, created an online petition to have federal authorities intervene in the case instead of the Bloomington Police Department.
The fraternity stated in a letter that “This agency has shown the inability to handle a case of this nature.”
In September, Day’s mother, Carmen, shared the petition to her Facebook page. She told ABC publicly that she suspected foul play in her son’s murder. She wants authorities to “use their tools and resources to find out what happened to Jelani because he did not vanish into thin air.” She also told Good Morning America that “Somebody knows something, somebody’s seen something, and I need somebody to speak something.”
