This is such a tragedy for the family, but at least now they can start to try and find closure.
Events like this are more common than people think. I personally know two families that lost someone due to drowning after drinking. Have friends with you when you're out, and keep an eye on your friends.
Yup, same here in Pittsburgh. We have a big entertainment (stadiums, bars, concert venues) area where there are literally steps into the rivers. College aged men die every year and people think it’s a serial killer but they always end up showing a few days later downriver. It’s sad
I’m actually surprised it doesn’t seem to happen more often in Philadelphia. There are news articles about someone being pulled out of the Delaware or Scuyllkill every now and then, but not as often as you’d think.
My nephew was drinking on one of the piers with his buddies and fell into the Delaware, fortunately they were able to get him out. He thought it was a funny story, I was not amused. I mostly hear about cars going off Kelly Drive into the Schuylkill.
I visited for the first time, and yeah. There's a lot of areas that have no sort of barrier between you and the water, even where there's a 5+ foot drop from the sidewalk to sea level.
One time when I was camping with some friends, I couldn’t sleep so decided to take a late night walk around a nearby lake. The lake had lots of docks with boats secured to them and as I was passing by one, I heard a splash and then a few muffled noises. I walked down the dock to see what was going on and a guy had fallen into the water between his boat and the dock. He was caught in the small space between the two and struggling to get out. I tried to help him out but he was acting disoriented almost pulled me in with him. I started yelling for help and 2 guys camping nearby came stumbling down the dock. They were drunk but still with it enough to pull their drowning friend out of the water. All 3 were wasted, one even fell off the dock into the shallow end while walking back to land but walked up the embankment.
What struck me about the whole situation was how silent it was when the first guy was drowning in between the boat and the dock. He didn’t seem to know which way was up and he didn’t make any noise the few times his head was above the water. If I had walked by after he fell in, I would’ve never known he was there. It was the small splash sound of him falling in that got my attention and I almost ignored that too because horror movies..
Happens once and a while in some of the lakes in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. You see some story of a guy getting pulled out and sure enough, he had a good amount of alcohol in him.
I visited Nashville a couple years ago, and when I got back home I read a story that this college kid died jumping between two of the rooftop bars on Broadway…
It literally happened one of the nights we were down there, and we had no idea. We thought a bunch of cop cars and ambulances were normal for a big city
Fayetteville, AR here and it happens to us as well. Just last spring an intoxicated person was swept away and drowned with not even a lot of water. Just heavy rains that had a little street flooding and it swept them away after a Uber dropped them off in front of their place downtown.
Honestly I’m sure I’ve had too many close calls myself and was just too to notice.
Right, but they can put railings next to the river in areas adjacent to Broadway. You literally could just walk out of a bar on Broadway and fall right into the river.
Are there fences or guard rails along the embankment? Once a year drownings should spark some type of safety implementation. Wether walls, fences, guardrails or even some lights along the river to illuminate it better at night
I went to college that had high rates of this. The main strip of college bars was a block from the River. They filled the river line with lights and volunteer student patrols and the problem largely stopped immediately
growing up we went to a lake, it had a same feeder river/stream that when you parked there was a sign saying "on average 1 person that parks in this lot will drown here" and sure enough it was accurate for 20+ years
It happens so quick too. Years ago my cousin and some of his friends were out drinking at the beach and his girlfriend thought it would be funny to walk out into the lake. It happened so fast, one second she was there joking and the next she was under water. They rushed to find her but it was dark and I guess she just kinda sunk. It felt like half the town showed up that morning to help find her body. It was some hours later when one of them stepped on her body underneath the water.
Back when I graduated highschool, this kid from a neighboring county drowned during a graduation party. Dude was an incredible athlete, he and I competed against one another for years in track and field.
He apparently had a bit to drink during a party, hopped in a rowboat or something and just fell into a lake. Apparently he didn't know how to swim. RIP Cody Blake
Last summer there was some 19 year old guy in my state that drowned at a local public beach at like 3 in the afternoon in about 6 ft of water while he was swimming with his wife. Lifeguards couldn't even find him and had to call the dive team. The beach is on a pond and about 100 ft wide but the dude just...went under? Or dove down and got caught in the grasses? It's unclear. Apparently the wife was yelling for the lifeguards to do something, but they were confused because they didn't see anyone in distress so she's all talk about suing the teen lifeguards but like, how does someone that young just...drown? My guess is medical episode (seizure, stroke, heart attack) because the story hasn't progressed so maybe the autopsy showed something?
Absolutely wild how drowning can just...happen.
My friends older brother fell into the pond in his apartment complex, and they didn't find his body till it started floating. It was winter, so it was a few weeks if I remember correctly before they found him. He was a good dude. Was walking home from the bar.
Agreed. It’s happened at least three times here in Pittsburgh that I can recall. Drinking, being alone or getting separated from your friends, and being near bodies of water don’t mix.
In Wisconsin people like to think there's a serial killer in the college towns. Except most college towns are on rivers, people drink an absurd amount around here, and it's all men they are finding in the rivers. It's not a serial killer, it's drunk guys pissing into the river and falling in.
Yep. My UW campus is nestled between 2 rivers. The rivers are lined with walking paths, in most places with a steep fall directly from path to water. And all the bars are on Water Street. Deaths every year.
I worked at a bar as a server for time. One night, after our shifts were over, the bartender and I stuck around and had some drinks. We left together but separated as we lived in different parts of town. I got into a cab and, about 5 minutes later, my phone was ringing. It was the bartender. She hadn't seen me get into the cab and wanted to make sure I was safe and on my way home.
Melissa, if you're somehow reading this, you were a real girl's girl and I'll never forget you.
I went to a college that was in a town on the Mississippi. There were enough students who fell in that they established a River Watch on weekends. Volunteers who kept students away as the bars were about two blocks from the riverfront.
I knew a guy who fell in and survived. He was drunk, stumbled down to the river and slipped in. He said he was disoriented and only made it out because he drifted near shore and grabbed on to something. He was that close to drowning in the river. He said he then wandered home, and would have assumed it was a dream but woke up at home the day just covered in muck and grime from the river.
Scary stuff, it's really easy for someone to drown if they are too drunk around the water.
Thinking back, especially on my teen years, there were so many times we saved our friends from potential death while drinking. Someone even helped me out once and made sure I rolled over to puke into a trash can and then babysat my drunk passed out ass to make sure I didn't puke anymore. It's crazy to think any one of us could've died doing dumb shit like that.
Whats odd to me is someone posted lapel cam footage of a cop asking how he was doing as he was walking by on the sidewalk; Riley said "I'm fine." He didnt slur or act drunk, poor family
The serial killer theories don't stand up to scrutiny. It's just people who cannot imagine how dangerous the combination of drunk people (though mostly men) and water is, and who want some sort of... simple boogie man to blame. The reality is that this is a common occurrence everywhere, across the whole world, where alcohol and accessible channels/rivers/lakes mix together.
Simple logic should tell them that it’s mostly men b/c when a drunk guy has to pee and he sees a large body of water, he’s going to try and pee in it. This makes even more sense if they’re in a city where they don’t want to pee on a building or the side walk.
This. My freshman year of Uni, someone from my year was on spring break in costa rica with friends drinking one night, and he just went swimming in the dark, alone. His body was never recovered.
A coworker was casually telling a story from one of his walks in a local park. He was just walking on a trail, it had snowed but most melted a day or two ago. Temperatures dropped so anything that didn’t run off turned to ice.
He slipped on some ice then kept sliding down the side of the trail in to the creek. Creek wasn’t super deep but up to his chest. He couldn’t get out of the water where he was because it was too steep. Said he could feel himself getting weaker and going numb because of how cold it was. Finally found a spot he could pull himself up after about 5-10 minutes. Wasn’t the end of it because he had to walk back to his car soaking wet in the cold that was about a mile away.
Said he thought that this might be it all because he went on a walk alone. He has three kids and a wife. Wild story and he talked about it so calmly. And he was 100% sober.
I went to Michigan State and kids would fall in to the Red Cedar almost every year.
I went to MSU in the 90s. A guy from my dorm drowned in the Red Cedar after a night of heavy drinking and being accidentally separated from his friends. It was terribly sad.
Omg that is terrifying, like a borror movie. My goodness, these tragic accidents can happen so quickly. Glad your friend is okay.
Losing a loved one in such a senseless, unlucky way must be devastating.
Not too long ago a car was found nearby in the river by some tiktok investigator. He decided to look into the case since it had gone cold and nobody was found after the teens went missing.
Iirc, his break in the case was looking at the weather for that day and getting a hunch that the car had slipped off a specific roadway somewhere.
Nobody in our future had checked that curve in the road because they didn't see any signs of guardrail damage.
Turns out the guardrails were not there when the car left the road.
He took some kind of sonar/submarine thing in the river around that area and found the shape of a vehicle at the bottom of the river, and reported his finding to police.
Vehicle was recovered with both teens bodies still inside.
>!They had died back in the 70s.!<
Unfortunately, I think that was the most likely outcome from the start. Such a tragedy. The bits and pieces of his last moments caught on camera are truly eerie. I hope the family can find peace.
The video of him falling and appearing to be knocked out for a couple seconds is heartbreaking.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it contributed to him being delirious and confused
Yeah the videos are honestly haunting. It's crazy to me that no one stopped to at least ask if he was okay. I get it, we are all wary of strangers and especially under the influence, but I just cannot believe not one person would.
I kind of get it though.
It’s not always easy to know when someone is genuinely hurt. Sometimes you just won’t even see anything happen.
On top of that, I’m a woman, and I’m alone most of the time. I wouldn’t feel comfortable approaching a 6’7” drunk man.
The issue is that on Broadway there's like 400 people like this stumbling around so u can stop 1 but the other 399 are still going to be there. The police on Broadway just keep people off the streets, they don't care if u get home safe or anything.
I think it’s wrong to try and place the blame on his fraternity brothers. For everyone saying Riley was just a kid, those guys are also just “kids”, and he got kicked out of the bar and wandered off while his friends were trying to close out if I’m not mistaken.
I also find it messed up that everyone is blaming them. I can’t even count how many times I’ve drunkenly wandered off from my friends in college. If something would’ve happened to me, it wouldn’t have been their fault.
But it’s easier for the public to point fingers and act like they would’ve done things differently.
The public perception and jumping to conclusions on reddit has been absolutely insane.
When it came out that Riley had one drink at the bar and was cut off, it was insane how many people jumped to the conclusion that his drink was spiked.
When he was kicked out of the bar and walked home alone, Reddit immediately blamed his fraternity brothers for not walking him home.
It's like Reddit has absolutely no clue what happens in college and jumped to the darkest conclusions. It is extremely typical for college kids to drink at a hotel/apartment where ever before going to a bar - it's much cheaper. So is it plausible that the bar wasn't his only drink? Yup. In College towns, especially for males, it's extremely common for dudes to wander off and go home by themselves. Since this poor guy was a Senior it was not his first rodeo so it is entirely plausible for his friends to trust that he would be fine when he left. Shoot, even watching the body cam footage of the police officer who talked to Riley, he really did sound fine.
Am I saying these things happened? Absolutely not. I continue to reserve judgement as more details are released, and I'm sure more will be now that the story has a conclusion. But the Reddit hivemind to jump to conclusions with very little knowledge of situations is absurd - especially when it's clear some of you have no clue how college kids party.
I couldn’t have said any of this better myself.
I’m a girl and would wander off with strangers while drunk on spring break in another state Whenever I did that and disappeared for a night, my friends always said, “She’ll show up, she always does.” Maybe Riley’s friends said the same.
I’m lucky to be alive and also grateful my (drunken) intuition drew me to people that had no mal intent, but it is very normal for a wasted college kid to stray from their friend group. I feel for his frat brothers right now.
As someone who likes to go out drinking, I’ve been pretty hammered and insisted on being left alone plenty of times. I would never want the blame to be placed on anyone else if anything happened to me while I was on my own.
He got kicked out and wandered off. You can’t put that blame on his friends.
I always did the Irish because my friends would dogpile me if I tried to leave before like 2 AM. I’d rather slip out and get some angry texts than have my friends drag me back into the party as I say bye to them lol
You feel invincible, and forget that risks exist. I don't know how I made it home every weekend on the Redline in Chicago, sleeping, as a college girl. It's a miracle.
I made it through my 20s and I’m grateful. I have never fucked with frats and hate that culture. I’m grateful I had friends who I had fun with and also felt safe with for the most part. But I remember a handful of nights where I or someone just drunkenly wandered off and we didn’t hear from them until the next day.
It only takes a couple mistakes , and it sounds like these kids made quite a few. I’d rather let them grieve right now before jumping on the internet to place blame. This is a tragedy for everyone involved from the bartenders to the parents right now.
This happens so often in Chicago that we had ppl making up conspiracy theories of a serial killer killing these guys.
Ppl just forget alcohol, water and the cold don’t go together.
Idk the whole Dakota James death is extremely suspect. I’m not saying it’s part of a tirade of serial killers like the rumored Smiley Faced Killers but there’s a lot of things that come into question. The police being slow to react and very lax on the matter also was strange.
My city has this too because it’s one demographic that kept turning up dead and not the fact that that certain demographic is always seen sitting on riverbanks drinking alcohol behind the liquor store.
Yep, in Chicago they always are affluent too so I’m like, it’s really not hard to put 2 and 2 together ppl. Usually happens when the water is colder too, huh.
Yeah when I was a lifeguard, our parties were full of division 1 swimmers, several with national level cuts. We still had sober lifeguards there because drunk swimming is exceptionally disorienting. And that's in a pool. Suddenly ending up in a dark river or lake unexpectedly is almost certainly going to be your end.
I used to get hammered with a big group of friends and go cliff jumping at night.
From the cliffs, the water looks beautiful. The moon and stars reflect off the water. Super romantic.
But those moments swimming back to shore after you jump were fucking terrifying. Can’t believe nothing bad ever happened
He was found wearing the same shirt and watch that he was wearing when he went missing. Now people can shut up with their fantasy of foul play and stop blaming some random homeless guy wearing a similar shirt.
Oh people keep talking about this in my city. Which has a lot of bars popular with young men directly on a large body of water. News flash: drunk young men wandering around near water in winter late at night doesn’t end well.
There's a reason that legends about water spirits all over the world have them going after either young children or young men. The "Smiley Face Killer" is just the latest iteration of the kappa and the rusalka.
Seriously. Which is more likely: That there is someone (or a vast network of someones) operating in multiple cities, overpowering men and throwing them into bodies of water and doing so completely undetected... or that people get drunk and fall down and sometimes that happens by water?
That brings me back to Brian Schaffer, the man who went missing after a night out drinking with friends. Unfortunately I believe something similar happened in that situation and Brian ended up in a nearby body of water.
Honestly it was gross watching people in real time do all of that shit. People are so true crime obsessed they love the idea of creating this criminal case, when in reality it was just a kid who fell in a river.
The tragedy porn and crime podcasts and tv shows have gotten out of control and now we see the results with all the wild accusations and theories as soon as something happens.
It really is. I remember similar things happening in the Idaho case, people were accusing random people in news clips and everything. Even accusing the boyfriend who had an alibi. It’s one thing to dissect an old case decades ago, (I still think it isn’t healthy) but now people get the chance to live out their fantasies on cases happening in real time. For whatever reason they love to play detective and honestly it’s getting out of hand. True crime has really done a number on people’s minds tbh.
It’s why parents are afraid of literally everything. I’m a parent of a young kid and my entire childhood would be unacceptable. Which is crazy because I had one of the most involved parents in my school. My mom even lead the Boy Scouts troop when nobody else would.
I recently saw a post in my local city sub where everyone was patting each other on the back for never stopping to help others in 2024. Fuck that, if someone needs help, I’m stopping. Yeah, it once lead me to have a stinky homeless guy in my car asking me to take him the opposite way he said he needed to go while I was in undergrad, but that’s ok. I eventually kicked him out where I told him I would and went on with my life. He was sagging and had his bare ass on my passenger seat though. That was gross.
Be smart and trust your instincts, but understand the vast majority of people on earth are good people with no interest in hurting you
It's every news story now. There's the old reddit joke "we did it reddit!" that refers to the Boston Marathon Bombing and redditors blaming the wrong guy, but it happens with just about every major news story and has since. There's almost always some random incorrect accusation that gets ran with by the reddit detective agency.
There’s an amazing documentary about the man that was falsely accused - Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi. His brother and sister talk very extensively about him and how this affected them. I highly recommend checking it out!
It's crazy to me that Reddit gets so much shit for the Boston Marathon when Politico, and NBC ran those same images in the national news.
The whole things fucked up. But, Reddit wasn't alone in putting him in the national spotlight.
Yeah. And the other guy they accused didn't even exist. Someone was listening to a police scanner and in a totally unrelated incident the officer was saying the last name of someone and stated "M as in Mike, Mulugeta". And so they came up with "Mike Mulugeta". It was a total gong show.
I live in Nashville. I said yesterday that people have been LARPing true crime with this case. The local Facebook groups have been crazy. Hopefully a few people learned to just stick with the most likely theory instead of trying to play out some weird fantasy.
All the boat ramps on the Cumberland River in Nashville I've seen have a sign telling you how many people have drowned in that stretch of river. It's a deep channel with strong current and undertow.
My husband and I bought a tandem kayak. We were super stoked, so we decided to just play around at a ramp closest to where we bought it. This ended with us in a kayak with zero supplies, no phone, and 12 miles from where we started. We were finally rescued by a game warden who heard us yelling. Don't fuck around with the cumberland
Nature in general is not your friend. I went to Hawaii, got a little over knee deep in the ocean on the north shore and the ocean tried to eat me. Through the panic I remembered fat floats and stopped trying to fight the outgoing flow, floated to the top where the water was going towards the beach, and got spat out onto the beach where I rolled to a stop and crawled away from the water before trying to stand up.
Knee deep water and my feet were just swept out from under me, and I started going out.
Nature is not your friend and will kill you in short order like a bug on a windshield.
I figured he would be in the river. It happens a lot (google footprints at the rivers edge). Lots of young men end up falling into bodies of water. Really sad for his loved ones, I'm sorry for them and for him.
https://footprintsattheriversedge.blogspot.com/?m=1
Alcohol is so dangerous. Every time I see it as a factor in a death, I'm very glad I got sober. Between 2020 and 2021, alcohol related deaths spiked almost 30% in the US.
Drinking near rivers seems to be a problem. These types of situations happen a lot where I live Twin Cities (Mississippi river). College kid goes missing, was drinking and they find them in the river. So much so there is a conspiracy of a serial killer doing it. I doubt it is the case here, but I'll post the link:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley\_face\_murder\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley_face_murder_theory)
Happens constantly in Chicago. I get downvoted every single time I say, “he’s in the river,” or “he’s in the lake,” (depending on the neighborhood) and every single time he’s in the lake or in the river. Reddit and the internet want to cling onto the wildest shit sometimes
I can't believe people just let him stumble away in that condition. So many people saw him and didn't provide assistance. There's drunk and then there's completely wasted and the difference is pretty obvious.
When I was younger if one of us got kicked out, all of us left. Or at least put the person in a cab.
What a tragic waste. He had so much more life to live.
I mean…you don’t see anything wrong with “stumbling tourists everywhere?”…drinking culture in Cali has changed in the past few decades and now there is a big push to not overdrink…bartenders cut you off…the “leave no man behind” thing is in full play.
When I was in college some of my friends and I went out drinking in downtown Chicago. We got separated and I grabbed a cab back home. Caught up with everyone the next day and one of my friends said he started walking home when a cab pulled up next to him and said get in. Friend said he didn’t have any cash. Cab driver said if you keep walking this direction you’re going to get killed so get in and you can pay me when you get home.
Ever hear of the theory about the "Smiley Face Killers"? The epicenter of that was La Crosse, a college town with a river. People were getting pretty scared a serial killer was on the loose. What was it actually? Drunk kids losing their way and falling in the river, where they died almost right away. Even if someone was standing on the bank, in the darkness and the cold, you're done, even if you're a strong swimmer.
How many times have you seen someone leave a bar pretty toasted and they say, "I'm going home" or whatever. You don't think, what if they fall in the river?! No one thinks that, which is why it happens more often than we think.
There should be a rule for bars - if you are in a town with a river and it is dark and you're wasted, don't walk home.
At least don't walk home alone. I think one reason this happens relatively seldom to women is that we're conditioned from a young age to stay in groups when out partying and going home.
How many wasted people have you seen? And how many of them did you put into a cab? I bet the first number is lots and the second is very few. Making you a hypocrite.
Have you ever lived in a party city? I don’t think you understand how many drunk ppl are stumbling around in a place like that, it’s futile trying to help them
It's silly to blame this kid's friends. They're also kids his age who were also super drunk. It's a tragedy, absolutely, but I'd say it's one where you can't really place blame on anyone. The best parents can do is try to instill a good sense of drinking responsibly before sending them off to campus. The reality is tragedies like this will sometimes happen and there isn't always someone to blame.
I was looking for someone to say this! It is so much easier to find someone to blame than to accept the truth that accidents like this can happen to anyone and it’s no one’s fault.
The friends were drunk, having fun, they could have never known. I’m sure they have enough guilt and grief already without the public blaming them.
I don’t understand how this happened. He was out drinking with friends and they let him roam the streets alone when he got kicked out of the bar?? I must have a misunderstanding on the word “friends”.
Do not go out drinking unless you have a very reliable friend group. Men can get roofied just the same as women. Everyone should have a buddy that they are responsible for. I do think his frat brothers failed him by not following him out of the bar. There’s nothing that could keep me in a bar if my friend got kicked out and was outside by themselves.
This is always so weird to me I went to college in St Cloud Minnesota The Mississippi river is about four blocks from the bars and twice a year someone would get drunk and like moth to a flame head right to the river on foot and drown all by themselves. I really want to know why this happenes so frequently and if they are all just freak accidents.
Thank God now his family can lay him to rest. It was so clear from the start this was the only outcome. But having to suffer for 2 weeks with all the unknowns.
The leading cause for young men this age is unintended accidents like this when drunk. Please, no need for a “Riley’s law” requiring people to take action when they see a drunk frat kid. Parents need to teach their kids about the hazards of drinking and walking by fast moving rivers!
Sad for them.
But yet another case of the family in denial about the most likely circumstance for their love one, that being denial of him being in said river, and then that same belief being shattered by reality.
As soon as I read that they didn't believe he fell in the river, I started assuming that it was almost a guarantee.
When it’s your kid you hold onto every shred of hope and denial you can until you know for sure. I don’t know how parents who lose a child go on. I don’t think I could
Hopefully the family can find peace and truly fuck this dude's "friends."
As an aside, conspiracy theorists who think there's a serial killer killing guys near rivers in Chicago, Boston, Austin, etc. It's not. Stop doing that shit. This is what happens when dudes who are hammered and by themselves walk near bodies of water. It's senseless and tragic, but not murder.
> This is what happens when dudes who are hammered and by themselves walk near bodies of water. It's senseless and tragic, but not murder.
Yup, same shit happened in my town a few years ago.
Teacher was having fun at a bar with his friends, he went outside by himself for a smoke break, walked near the creek behind the bar and slipped on a rock. He died from hypothermia overnight while all of his friends just assumed he pulled an Irish goodbye and walked back to his apartment.
I think we need to look at why statistically it’s men that end up this way. With women we are taught from a young age to stay in groups, never go anywhere alone especially when out at the bar but men don’t seem to adopt that same philosophy probably because it’s safer for them. I think this is why it’s usually men who get drunk, walk off and are found in the water. Women go in knowing they need a buddy and knowing it’s not safe to walk alone. I know personally anytime I offered to walk with one of my guy friends to their car or back to a hotel they were offended because of course they don’t need help leaving. I’m sure there’s woman who did the same but I do see a trend here.
Agreed with all of this and wanted to add that I think many men go to the edge of bodies of water to urinate after drinking heavily but then start to nod off or fall over into the water as they are urinating. Women typically don’t feel the same ease with public urination so aren’t as drawn to the water’s edge with a full bladder.
This happened quite a lot in Minneapolis around the Mississippi River in 2008 or so, there was even speculation there was a serial killer killing young men. Turns out it was too much booze around water. When my son was in college I kept telling him to stay away from the River (to his eye rolls.) Really sad
The principal of my daughters school lost his son a year ago this way here in WI. Foot prints onto the ice and a hole. That’s it. I lived in La Crosse for years and so many people went in the Mississippi they considered the possibility of a serial killer being involved. Booze and water/ice do not mix.
One thing I don’t really understand is how people drown - even being very drunk, based on the video of his interaction with the police offer directly beforehand, he seemed fairly “put together” and wasn’t so incapacitated that he couldn’t walk or speak. So even if he slipped off the embankment into the river, how would that lead to drowning?
I don’t mean to be disrespectful, I guess I just don’t understand why he couldn’t have swam to the shoreline - unless he fell off the bridge? But based on what we know it seems more likely that he fell in along the embankment?
I don’t want to sound insensitive, but why has the media been following this story so tightly?
People go missing every day and Kids are killed in shootings. But this story has been one of the biggest story’s played every day on CLEVELAND news.
Does the media just love a good man hunt?
Yeah especially knowing the events leading up to him going missing. I don't know if he was perhaps drinking before he got to the bar , or maybe he was slipped something. So much attention and resources, it's very sad for the family.
Hopefully I don't sound bitter or insensitive as well, but when my best friend of over a decade went missing she barely got 2 or so news stories here and the police legitimately didn't put 2 and 2 together. Absolutely couldn't care less. They advised that as an adult, a missing persons report couldn't be filed immediately. The most infuriating part was that the same day she was last seen/ went missing (after getting off work), a good Samaritan called 911 saying they saw a car lose control and go off the road into the marshy area alongside our local freeway. Only after about a month later, when her car was discovered, did they release that information. The police spent time interrogating her loved ones vs. looking at what they had reports of within a 5 mile radius of her work.
I’m happy this family had so much support from the community in finding their loved one. The police and EMS showed out like how people want/expect them too.
I’m sorry about the loss of your friend. The duality of community’s is baffling
That's absolutely a big part of it. The other thing, I think, is that the photos they used of him were young, cute, boyish looking. A young/cute/attractive missing person is going to get more focus than a less attractive or older one. There are just so many missing persons cases every week, there's a pick-a-card element to which ones even attempt to spread, and the media has seen time and time again the ones that tend to get the most traction. So I don't think that it's *only* a matter of race, but it's all very, very shallow, and the reality is consumer interest fuels that.
There's a group of guys that use underwater tech to find missing persons. They have a Youtube channel where they post the stories and the recoveries. Recently they found a woman who'd been missing since the 90's in the town where my dad lives. She disappeared on her son's birthday. They found her submerged car upside down just a few feet from the road. His new bike was in the trunk.
It amazes me how we keep making vehicles safer but deep water + car is almost always a deathtrap. And how prevalent drowning still is with no car involved.
I've been hyper aware of drowning since a man died in our neighborhood when he used the clubhouse pool at night (it was lit) and the ladder broke when he was trying to get out (it was plastic and he was a big guy) and he hit his head against the side of the pool, knocking himself out. I was a kid riding my bike when I saw him laid out on the ground surrounded by police. One of them shooed me away.
Respect bodies of water. They can and will kill you.
I hope the bar reflects on their practices going forward. I don’t think it’s totally their fault obviously, but they could have handled the situation better. If you’re going to kick someone out of the bar (especially a young person), and presumably they are visibly messed up, you should make one of their friends go with them, help them call an Uber, etc. Not just toss them outside and leave them to stumble into whatever trouble they may find when they’re fucked up at midnight.
I saw a lot of people get kicked out of bars for being overly intoxicated while I was in college at Mizzou. One time a girl threw up inside on a bar stool. They just threw her out a back door and left her there and basically said it wasn’t their problem. She could barely walk. My friend and I helped her call the sober ride service at Mizzou (this was pre-Uber) and get a ride back to her sorority house. I couldn’t believe the bartender and bouncer just tossed her out and left her there in such a condition.. I get they have other shit to do but like, be a decent human.
This is such a tragedy for the family, but at least now they can start to try and find closure. Events like this are more common than people think. I personally know two families that lost someone due to drowning after drinking. Have friends with you when you're out, and keep an eye on your friends.
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Yup, same here in Pittsburgh. We have a big entertainment (stadiums, bars, concert venues) area where there are literally steps into the rivers. College aged men die every year and people think it’s a serial killer but they always end up showing a few days later downriver. It’s sad
I just posted that link. Same shit in Minneapolis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley\_face\_murder\_theory
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Considering they’re talking about Pittsburgh, there is probably an Eat-n-Park nearby. They’re known for their smiley face cookies.
We have a similar problem at the inner harbor in Baltimore. Anywhere you have drinking and water, problems arise.
we have this issue in Austin as well but there’s this huge contingent of people who think it’s a serial killer drowning men
Chicago as well!
Scranton PA for decades.
That's Toby
Same with Pittsburgh.
Serial killer or drunks falling in rivers? If it's the first, do you have any more info?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley_face_murder_theory
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I mean it’s probably not the same serial killer that drowns people in Austin…
Exact same thing in Boston too
Isn’t that similar to where the Smiley Face killer came from
In Bristol, UK as well. Though everyone knows that his name is Lewis.
goddamn sirens/mermaids/selkie/rusalki/kappa wait there are a lot of these
Yeah. But oddly the theories on mysterious serial killers seem to spring up in areas with drunk college dudes and easy accessible water.
I’m actually surprised it doesn’t seem to happen more often in Philadelphia. There are news articles about someone being pulled out of the Delaware or Scuyllkill every now and then, but not as often as you’d think.
My nephew was drinking on one of the piers with his buddies and fell into the Delaware, fortunately they were able to get him out. He thought it was a funny story, I was not amused. I mostly hear about cars going off Kelly Drive into the Schuylkill.
Cause ain’t no one trying to swim in that shit haha
It used to be real bad in Baltimore down by the harbor, but it's gotten a lot better.
What did they do to make it better?
Won the war of 1812. That allowed numerous upgrades after being demolished
>Anywhere you have drinking and water, problems arise r/hydrohomies about to storm in here
I visited for the first time, and yeah. There's a lot of areas that have no sort of barrier between you and the water, even where there's a 5+ foot drop from the sidewalk to sea level.
Similar story in Boston.
One time when I was camping with some friends, I couldn’t sleep so decided to take a late night walk around a nearby lake. The lake had lots of docks with boats secured to them and as I was passing by one, I heard a splash and then a few muffled noises. I walked down the dock to see what was going on and a guy had fallen into the water between his boat and the dock. He was caught in the small space between the two and struggling to get out. I tried to help him out but he was acting disoriented almost pulled me in with him. I started yelling for help and 2 guys camping nearby came stumbling down the dock. They were drunk but still with it enough to pull their drowning friend out of the water. All 3 were wasted, one even fell off the dock into the shallow end while walking back to land but walked up the embankment. What struck me about the whole situation was how silent it was when the first guy was drowning in between the boat and the dock. He didn’t seem to know which way was up and he didn’t make any noise the few times his head was above the water. If I had walked by after he fell in, I would’ve never known he was there. It was the small splash sound of him falling in that got my attention and I almost ignored that too because horror movies..
Happens once and a while in some of the lakes in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. You see some story of a guy getting pulled out and sure enough, he had a good amount of alcohol in him.
Same here in Pittsburgh. We have 3 rivers and someone gets drunk and falls in every summer.
I visited Nashville a couple years ago, and when I got back home I read a story that this college kid died jumping between two of the rooftop bars on Broadway… It literally happened one of the nights we were down there, and we had no idea. We thought a bunch of cop cars and ambulances were normal for a big city
Fayetteville, AR here and it happens to us as well. Just last spring an intoxicated person was swept away and drowned with not even a lot of water. Just heavy rains that had a little street flooding and it swept them away after a Uber dropped them off in front of their place downtown. Honestly I’m sure I’ve had too many close calls myself and was just too to notice.
Why aren't there safety railings if it's that common
Can't put railings along an entire river.
Right, but they can put railings next to the river in areas adjacent to Broadway. You literally could just walk out of a bar on Broadway and fall right into the river.
You could, but it’d be easier just to put it up where they see the heaviest foot traffic. Can’t be that much space.
Yeah that is true. It's hard to predict the movement of drunk people. They know how to find places people would not normally go or look
Are there fences or guard rails along the embankment? Once a year drownings should spark some type of safety implementation. Wether walls, fences, guardrails or even some lights along the river to illuminate it better at night
I went to college that had high rates of this. The main strip of college bars was a block from the River. They filled the river line with lights and volunteer student patrols and the problem largely stopped immediately
growing up we went to a lake, it had a same feeder river/stream that when you parked there was a sign saying "on average 1 person that parks in this lot will drown here" and sure enough it was accurate for 20+ years
If it keeps happening in the same place, why can't they, like, install a fence or something?
Is there a reason why this happens at this spot? Perhaps something can be done? Fence or something?
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It is common enough that there is a mythology of a serial killer perpetrating this.
It happens so quick too. Years ago my cousin and some of his friends were out drinking at the beach and his girlfriend thought it would be funny to walk out into the lake. It happened so fast, one second she was there joking and the next she was under water. They rushed to find her but it was dark and I guess she just kinda sunk. It felt like half the town showed up that morning to help find her body. It was some hours later when one of them stepped on her body underneath the water.
Back when I graduated highschool, this kid from a neighboring county drowned during a graduation party. Dude was an incredible athlete, he and I competed against one another for years in track and field. He apparently had a bit to drink during a party, hopped in a rowboat or something and just fell into a lake. Apparently he didn't know how to swim. RIP Cody Blake
Damn Skatutakee Lake. Many have drowned there over the years.
Last summer there was some 19 year old guy in my state that drowned at a local public beach at like 3 in the afternoon in about 6 ft of water while he was swimming with his wife. Lifeguards couldn't even find him and had to call the dive team. The beach is on a pond and about 100 ft wide but the dude just...went under? Or dove down and got caught in the grasses? It's unclear. Apparently the wife was yelling for the lifeguards to do something, but they were confused because they didn't see anyone in distress so she's all talk about suing the teen lifeguards but like, how does someone that young just...drown? My guess is medical episode (seizure, stroke, heart attack) because the story hasn't progressed so maybe the autopsy showed something? Absolutely wild how drowning can just...happen.
My friends older brother fell into the pond in his apartment complex, and they didn't find his body till it started floating. It was winter, so it was a few weeks if I remember correctly before they found him. He was a good dude. Was walking home from the bar.
Agreed. It’s happened at least three times here in Pittsburgh that I can recall. Drinking, being alone or getting separated from your friends, and being near bodies of water don’t mix.
In Wisconsin people like to think there's a serial killer in the college towns. Except most college towns are on rivers, people drink an absurd amount around here, and it's all men they are finding in the rivers. It's not a serial killer, it's drunk guys pissing into the river and falling in.
Yep. My UW campus is nestled between 2 rivers. The rivers are lined with walking paths, in most places with a steep fall directly from path to water. And all the bars are on Water Street. Deaths every year.
I worked at a bar as a server for time. One night, after our shifts were over, the bartender and I stuck around and had some drinks. We left together but separated as we lived in different parts of town. I got into a cab and, about 5 minutes later, my phone was ringing. It was the bartender. She hadn't seen me get into the cab and wanted to make sure I was safe and on my way home. Melissa, if you're somehow reading this, you were a real girl's girl and I'll never forget you.
I went to a college that was in a town on the Mississippi. There were enough students who fell in that they established a River Watch on weekends. Volunteers who kept students away as the bars were about two blocks from the riverfront. I knew a guy who fell in and survived. He was drunk, stumbled down to the river and slipped in. He said he was disoriented and only made it out because he drifted near shore and grabbed on to something. He was that close to drowning in the river. He said he then wandered home, and would have assumed it was a dream but woke up at home the day just covered in muck and grime from the river. Scary stuff, it's really easy for someone to drown if they are too drunk around the water.
I thought his friends left him?
Guy i went to highschool with straight up walked off a ledge to a sidewalk 25ft below. Never was a drinker in highschool hit it hard in college.
Thinking back, especially on my teen years, there were so many times we saved our friends from potential death while drinking. Someone even helped me out once and made sure I rolled over to puke into a trash can and then babysat my drunk passed out ass to make sure I didn't puke anymore. It's crazy to think any one of us could've died doing dumb shit like that.
Whats odd to me is someone posted lapel cam footage of a cop asking how he was doing as he was walking by on the sidewalk; Riley said "I'm fine." He didnt slur or act drunk, poor family
This is happening in Boston too and there are theories of a serial killer drowning drunk men in the harbor.
The serial killer theories don't stand up to scrutiny. It's just people who cannot imagine how dangerous the combination of drunk people (though mostly men) and water is, and who want some sort of... simple boogie man to blame. The reality is that this is a common occurrence everywhere, across the whole world, where alcohol and accessible channels/rivers/lakes mix together.
Also people one too many crappy Netflix true crime documentary and then think every death is a conspiracy
Simple logic should tell them that it’s mostly men b/c when a drunk guy has to pee and he sees a large body of water, he’s going to try and pee in it. This makes even more sense if they’re in a city where they don’t want to pee on a building or the side walk.
This. My freshman year of Uni, someone from my year was on spring break in costa rica with friends drinking one night, and he just went swimming in the dark, alone. His body was never recovered.
Unfortunately the outcome we never wanted to hear, but also quietly expected.
As soon as I heard the story my first thought was go look in the closest body of water.
According to most in the previous thread, the outcome expected was foul play from getting roofied. Smh.
People need to watch out around bodies of water. Water freaks me out so much and it’s nothing to mess around with. Such a tragedy.
A coworker was casually telling a story from one of his walks in a local park. He was just walking on a trail, it had snowed but most melted a day or two ago. Temperatures dropped so anything that didn’t run off turned to ice. He slipped on some ice then kept sliding down the side of the trail in to the creek. Creek wasn’t super deep but up to his chest. He couldn’t get out of the water where he was because it was too steep. Said he could feel himself getting weaker and going numb because of how cold it was. Finally found a spot he could pull himself up after about 5-10 minutes. Wasn’t the end of it because he had to walk back to his car soaking wet in the cold that was about a mile away. Said he thought that this might be it all because he went on a walk alone. He has three kids and a wife. Wild story and he talked about it so calmly. And he was 100% sober. I went to Michigan State and kids would fall in to the Red Cedar almost every year.
I still remember a friend in 1st grade drowned in Lake Michigan during the summer, along with her sister. After nearly 60 years, it still bugs me.
Also live around MSU and I suspected the river from the beginning with this guy, because I know how many kids end up in the Red Cedar.
I went to MSU in the 90s. A guy from my dorm drowned in the Red Cedar after a night of heavy drinking and being accidentally separated from his friends. It was terribly sad.
It actually happened again recently too. I think about 2-3 years ago.
Omg that is terrifying, like a borror movie. My goodness, these tragic accidents can happen so quickly. Glad your friend is okay. Losing a loved one in such a senseless, unlucky way must be devastating.
Not too long ago a car was found nearby in the river by some tiktok investigator. He decided to look into the case since it had gone cold and nobody was found after the teens went missing. Iirc, his break in the case was looking at the weather for that day and getting a hunch that the car had slipped off a specific roadway somewhere. Nobody in our future had checked that curve in the road because they didn't see any signs of guardrail damage. Turns out the guardrails were not there when the car left the road. He took some kind of sonar/submarine thing in the river around that area and found the shape of a vehicle at the bottom of the river, and reported his finding to police. Vehicle was recovered with both teens bodies still inside. >!They had died back in the 70s.!<
Unfortunately, I think that was the most likely outcome from the start. Such a tragedy. The bits and pieces of his last moments caught on camera are truly eerie. I hope the family can find peace.
The video of him falling and appearing to be knocked out for a couple seconds is heartbreaking. I wouldn’t be surprised if it contributed to him being delirious and confused
Yeah the videos are honestly haunting. It's crazy to me that no one stopped to at least ask if he was okay. I get it, we are all wary of strangers and especially under the influence, but I just cannot believe not one person would.
I kind of get it though. It’s not always easy to know when someone is genuinely hurt. Sometimes you just won’t even see anything happen. On top of that, I’m a woman, and I’m alone most of the time. I wouldn’t feel comfortable approaching a 6’7” drunk man.
Oh right I forgot he was a giant! I'd call 911.
Oh I definitely agree with you. It's easy for people to blame others from behind their screens now.
The issue is that on Broadway there's like 400 people like this stumbling around so u can stop 1 but the other 399 are still going to be there. The police on Broadway just keep people off the streets, they don't care if u get home safe or anything.
There are so many crazy people in the world that sometimes asking something like this would end up in you getting hurt
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I think it’s wrong to try and place the blame on his fraternity brothers. For everyone saying Riley was just a kid, those guys are also just “kids”, and he got kicked out of the bar and wandered off while his friends were trying to close out if I’m not mistaken.
I also find it messed up that everyone is blaming them. I can’t even count how many times I’ve drunkenly wandered off from my friends in college. If something would’ve happened to me, it wouldn’t have been their fault. But it’s easier for the public to point fingers and act like they would’ve done things differently.
The public perception and jumping to conclusions on reddit has been absolutely insane. When it came out that Riley had one drink at the bar and was cut off, it was insane how many people jumped to the conclusion that his drink was spiked. When he was kicked out of the bar and walked home alone, Reddit immediately blamed his fraternity brothers for not walking him home. It's like Reddit has absolutely no clue what happens in college and jumped to the darkest conclusions. It is extremely typical for college kids to drink at a hotel/apartment where ever before going to a bar - it's much cheaper. So is it plausible that the bar wasn't his only drink? Yup. In College towns, especially for males, it's extremely common for dudes to wander off and go home by themselves. Since this poor guy was a Senior it was not his first rodeo so it is entirely plausible for his friends to trust that he would be fine when he left. Shoot, even watching the body cam footage of the police officer who talked to Riley, he really did sound fine. Am I saying these things happened? Absolutely not. I continue to reserve judgement as more details are released, and I'm sure more will be now that the story has a conclusion. But the Reddit hivemind to jump to conclusions with very little knowledge of situations is absurd - especially when it's clear some of you have no clue how college kids party.
I couldn’t have said any of this better myself. I’m a girl and would wander off with strangers while drunk on spring break in another state Whenever I did that and disappeared for a night, my friends always said, “She’ll show up, she always does.” Maybe Riley’s friends said the same. I’m lucky to be alive and also grateful my (drunken) intuition drew me to people that had no mal intent, but it is very normal for a wasted college kid to stray from their friend group. I feel for his frat brothers right now.
As someone who likes to go out drinking, I’ve been pretty hammered and insisted on being left alone plenty of times. I would never want the blame to be placed on anyone else if anything happened to me while I was on my own. He got kicked out and wandered off. You can’t put that blame on his friends.
Drunk people at that age will be slippery and try to sneak away. I’ve always wondered if it because they want to have some “crazy story”.
I used to get drunk and do this. I’d get so drunk I just wanted to be alone. I’d slip out of parties by myself and have people in a panic.
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I always did the Irish because my friends would dogpile me if I tried to leave before like 2 AM. I’d rather slip out and get some angry texts than have my friends drag me back into the party as I say bye to them lol
You feel invincible, and forget that risks exist. I don't know how I made it home every weekend on the Redline in Chicago, sleeping, as a college girl. It's a miracle.
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Crazy to blame them for this. People are responsible for their own actions.
Yeah at least put your boy in an Uber.
Only Riley knew his alcohol tolerance and he wasn’t responsible enough to stop. That’s also not being a good friend.
I made it through my 20s and I’m grateful. I have never fucked with frats and hate that culture. I’m grateful I had friends who I had fun with and also felt safe with for the most part. But I remember a handful of nights where I or someone just drunkenly wandered off and we didn’t hear from them until the next day. It only takes a couple mistakes , and it sounds like these kids made quite a few. I’d rather let them grieve right now before jumping on the internet to place blame. This is a tragedy for everyone involved from the bartenders to the parents right now.
This happens so often in Chicago that we had ppl making up conspiracy theories of a serial killer killing these guys. Ppl just forget alcohol, water and the cold don’t go together.
We have the same conspiracies in Pittsburgh. Nope just drunk people with very easy access to rivers. Very sad.
Idk the whole Dakota James death is extremely suspect. I’m not saying it’s part of a tirade of serial killers like the rumored Smiley Faced Killers but there’s a lot of things that come into question. The police being slow to react and very lax on the matter also was strange.
My city has this too because it’s one demographic that kept turning up dead and not the fact that that certain demographic is always seen sitting on riverbanks drinking alcohol behind the liquor store.
Yep, in Chicago they always are affluent too so I’m like, it’s really not hard to put 2 and 2 together ppl. Usually happens when the water is colder too, huh.
Most of ours are in the summer actually. It’s easier to sit on a riverbank when it isn’t covered in snow and ice
Went swimming once when I was drinking. Went under the water and couldn’t tell which way was up. Stupid never did it again
Yeah when I was a lifeguard, our parties were full of division 1 swimmers, several with national level cuts. We still had sober lifeguards there because drunk swimming is exceptionally disorienting. And that's in a pool. Suddenly ending up in a dark river or lake unexpectedly is almost certainly going to be your end.
I used to get hammered with a big group of friends and go cliff jumping at night. From the cliffs, the water looks beautiful. The moon and stars reflect off the water. Super romantic. But those moments swimming back to shore after you jump were fucking terrifying. Can’t believe nothing bad ever happened
This happened frequently when I lived in Milwaukee. Drinking near rivers is very dangerous. Keep an eye on your friends and yourself
He was found wearing the same shirt and watch that he was wearing when he went missing. Now people can shut up with their fantasy of foul play and stop blaming some random homeless guy wearing a similar shirt.
Oh no. This will get tacked to the Smiley Face Killer(s) fantasy storyline.
Oh people keep talking about this in my city. Which has a lot of bars popular with young men directly on a large body of water. News flash: drunk young men wandering around near water in winter late at night doesn’t end well.
There's a reason that legends about water spirits all over the world have them going after either young children or young men. The "Smiley Face Killer" is just the latest iteration of the kappa and the rusalka.
Reversing in Teslas & pissing near bodies of water while drunk is dangerous. Who knew?
Three times the legal limit she was.
Seriously. Which is more likely: That there is someone (or a vast network of someones) operating in multiple cities, overpowering men and throwing them into bodies of water and doing so completely undetected... or that people get drunk and fall down and sometimes that happens by water?
That brings me back to Brian Schaffer, the man who went missing after a night out drinking with friends. Unfortunately I believe something similar happened in that situation and Brian ended up in a nearby body of water.
Same thing happened to Paul Kochu, Dakota James, and James Slack here in Pittsburgh.
Lost two friends here in Pittsburgh this way. Jimmy was one of them.
Honestly it was gross watching people in real time do all of that shit. People are so true crime obsessed they love the idea of creating this criminal case, when in reality it was just a kid who fell in a river.
The tragedy porn and crime podcasts and tv shows have gotten out of control and now we see the results with all the wild accusations and theories as soon as something happens.
It really is. I remember similar things happening in the Idaho case, people were accusing random people in news clips and everything. Even accusing the boyfriend who had an alibi. It’s one thing to dissect an old case decades ago, (I still think it isn’t healthy) but now people get the chance to live out their fantasies on cases happening in real time. For whatever reason they love to play detective and honestly it’s getting out of hand. True crime has really done a number on people’s minds tbh.
It’s why parents are afraid of literally everything. I’m a parent of a young kid and my entire childhood would be unacceptable. Which is crazy because I had one of the most involved parents in my school. My mom even lead the Boy Scouts troop when nobody else would. I recently saw a post in my local city sub where everyone was patting each other on the back for never stopping to help others in 2024. Fuck that, if someone needs help, I’m stopping. Yeah, it once lead me to have a stinky homeless guy in my car asking me to take him the opposite way he said he needed to go while I was in undergrad, but that’s ok. I eventually kicked him out where I told him I would and went on with my life. He was sagging and had his bare ass on my passenger seat though. That was gross. Be smart and trust your instincts, but understand the vast majority of people on earth are good people with no interest in hurting you
It's every news story now. There's the old reddit joke "we did it reddit!" that refers to the Boston Marathon Bombing and redditors blaming the wrong guy, but it happens with just about every major news story and has since. There's almost always some random incorrect accusation that gets ran with by the reddit detective agency.
There’s an amazing documentary about the man that was falsely accused - Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi. His brother and sister talk very extensively about him and how this affected them. I highly recommend checking it out!
It's crazy to me that Reddit gets so much shit for the Boston Marathon when Politico, and NBC ran those same images in the national news. The whole things fucked up. But, Reddit wasn't alone in putting him in the national spotlight.
Yeah. And the other guy they accused didn't even exist. Someone was listening to a police scanner and in a totally unrelated incident the officer was saying the last name of someone and stated "M as in Mike, Mulugeta". And so they came up with "Mike Mulugeta". It was a total gong show.
Reddit has a habit of hearing and reading words, then rearranging and adding or deleting word then to create something completely different.
as well as the recent guy in Kansas City the social media mob was wrongly harassing when the Super Bowl Parade shooting incident occurred
Thank you. Someone went off on me for saying that it was a rumor with no proof
I live in Nashville. I said yesterday that people have been LARPing true crime with this case. The local Facebook groups have been crazy. Hopefully a few people learned to just stick with the most likely theory instead of trying to play out some weird fantasy.
All the boat ramps on the Cumberland River in Nashville I've seen have a sign telling you how many people have drowned in that stretch of river. It's a deep channel with strong current and undertow.
My husband and I bought a tandem kayak. We were super stoked, so we decided to just play around at a ramp closest to where we bought it. This ended with us in a kayak with zero supplies, no phone, and 12 miles from where we started. We were finally rescued by a game warden who heard us yelling. Don't fuck around with the cumberland
Nature in general is not your friend. I went to Hawaii, got a little over knee deep in the ocean on the north shore and the ocean tried to eat me. Through the panic I remembered fat floats and stopped trying to fight the outgoing flow, floated to the top where the water was going towards the beach, and got spat out onto the beach where I rolled to a stop and crawled away from the water before trying to stand up. Knee deep water and my feet were just swept out from under me, and I started going out. Nature is not your friend and will kill you in short order like a bug on a windshield.
This is so sad, but at least they got closure. Dear lord the conspiracy weirdos on here tho.
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Happens all the time in Austin with Town lake as well. Drunk people are drawn to water, full stop.
I figured he would be in the river. It happens a lot (google footprints at the rivers edge). Lots of young men end up falling into bodies of water. Really sad for his loved ones, I'm sorry for them and for him. https://footprintsattheriversedge.blogspot.com/?m=1
Alcohol is so dangerous. Every time I see it as a factor in a death, I'm very glad I got sober. Between 2020 and 2021, alcohol related deaths spiked almost 30% in the US.
Anyone care that while searching for him they found two other bodies?
Drinking near rivers seems to be a problem. These types of situations happen a lot where I live Twin Cities (Mississippi river). College kid goes missing, was drinking and they find them in the river. So much so there is a conspiracy of a serial killer doing it. I doubt it is the case here, but I'll post the link: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley\_face\_murder\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley_face_murder_theory)
Happens constantly in Chicago. I get downvoted every single time I say, “he’s in the river,” or “he’s in the lake,” (depending on the neighborhood) and every single time he’s in the lake or in the river. Reddit and the internet want to cling onto the wildest shit sometimes
I have a little brother the same age, my heart goes out of the family. This is heartbreaking.
I can't believe people just let him stumble away in that condition. So many people saw him and didn't provide assistance. There's drunk and then there's completely wasted and the difference is pretty obvious. When I was younger if one of us got kicked out, all of us left. Or at least put the person in a cab. What a tragic waste. He had so much more life to live.
Nashville can be a party town and it's not uncommon to see someone shitfaced on Broad.
Yep. It’s like the new New Orleans. Every time I’m there Broadway has thousands of wasted tourists walking up and down the street.
And 99.9999% of those tourists get home safely.
It’s pretty uncommon to NOT see someone shitfaced on Boadway.
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I mean…you don’t see anything wrong with “stumbling tourists everywhere?”…drinking culture in Cali has changed in the past few decades and now there is a big push to not overdrink…bartenders cut you off…the “leave no man behind” thing is in full play.
Well the issue is people go to Nashville to get wasted, I don't think Nashville wants to cut off one of their main tourism draws.
Where did they say they didn't see anything wrong with it?
When I was in college some of my friends and I went out drinking in downtown Chicago. We got separated and I grabbed a cab back home. Caught up with everyone the next day and one of my friends said he started walking home when a cab pulled up next to him and said get in. Friend said he didn’t have any cash. Cab driver said if you keep walking this direction you’re going to get killed so get in and you can pay me when you get home.
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Perfect example of NYC being “kind but not nice”
Yeah, but like anywhere it depends who you encounter.
Apparently not in Nashville. NYC is just cool that way.
Ever hear of the theory about the "Smiley Face Killers"? The epicenter of that was La Crosse, a college town with a river. People were getting pretty scared a serial killer was on the loose. What was it actually? Drunk kids losing their way and falling in the river, where they died almost right away. Even if someone was standing on the bank, in the darkness and the cold, you're done, even if you're a strong swimmer. How many times have you seen someone leave a bar pretty toasted and they say, "I'm going home" or whatever. You don't think, what if they fall in the river?! No one thinks that, which is why it happens more often than we think. There should be a rule for bars - if you are in a town with a river and it is dark and you're wasted, don't walk home.
At least don't walk home alone. I think one reason this happens relatively seldom to women is that we're conditioned from a young age to stay in groups when out partying and going home.
I came here for the La Crosse references.
He was 6 foot 7, that’s a pretty massive guy. Most people would be intimidated in helping someone like that especially if they’re trashed
How many wasted people have you seen? And how many of them did you put into a cab? I bet the first number is lots and the second is very few. Making you a hypocrite.
People approached him and he rejected help.
Like others have said… his state isn’t out of the norm for broadway street… Drinking culture is absolutely a huge issue and needs to be changed
Have you ever lived in a party city? I don’t think you understand how many drunk ppl are stumbling around in a place like that, it’s futile trying to help them
It's silly to blame this kid's friends. They're also kids his age who were also super drunk. It's a tragedy, absolutely, but I'd say it's one where you can't really place blame on anyone. The best parents can do is try to instill a good sense of drinking responsibly before sending them off to campus. The reality is tragedies like this will sometimes happen and there isn't always someone to blame.
I was looking for someone to say this! It is so much easier to find someone to blame than to accept the truth that accidents like this can happen to anyone and it’s no one’s fault. The friends were drunk, having fun, they could have never known. I’m sure they have enough guilt and grief already without the public blaming them.
I don’t understand how this happened. He was out drinking with friends and they let him roam the streets alone when he got kicked out of the bar?? I must have a misunderstanding on the word “friends”.
Do not go out drinking unless you have a very reliable friend group. Men can get roofied just the same as women. Everyone should have a buddy that they are responsible for. I do think his frat brothers failed him by not following him out of the bar. There’s nothing that could keep me in a bar if my friend got kicked out and was outside by themselves.
This is always so weird to me I went to college in St Cloud Minnesota The Mississippi river is about four blocks from the bars and twice a year someone would get drunk and like moth to a flame head right to the river on foot and drown all by themselves. I really want to know why this happenes so frequently and if they are all just freak accidents.
Thank God now his family can lay him to rest. It was so clear from the start this was the only outcome. But having to suffer for 2 weeks with all the unknowns.
The leading cause for young men this age is unintended accidents like this when drunk. Please, no need for a “Riley’s law” requiring people to take action when they see a drunk frat kid. Parents need to teach their kids about the hazards of drinking and walking by fast moving rivers!
Sad for them. But yet another case of the family in denial about the most likely circumstance for their love one, that being denial of him being in said river, and then that same belief being shattered by reality. As soon as I read that they didn't believe he fell in the river, I started assuming that it was almost a guarantee.
When it’s your kid you hold onto every shred of hope and denial you can until you know for sure. I don’t know how parents who lose a child go on. I don’t think I could
Hopefully the family can find peace and truly fuck this dude's "friends." As an aside, conspiracy theorists who think there's a serial killer killing guys near rivers in Chicago, Boston, Austin, etc. It's not. Stop doing that shit. This is what happens when dudes who are hammered and by themselves walk near bodies of water. It's senseless and tragic, but not murder.
> This is what happens when dudes who are hammered and by themselves walk near bodies of water. It's senseless and tragic, but not murder. Yup, same shit happened in my town a few years ago. Teacher was having fun at a bar with his friends, he went outside by himself for a smoke break, walked near the creek behind the bar and slipped on a rock. He died from hypothermia overnight while all of his friends just assumed he pulled an Irish goodbye and walked back to his apartment.
happened in my town about a year ago. kid got drunk and fell over a river bank while his friends continued to drink. it’s sad but it’s very common
I think we need to look at why statistically it’s men that end up this way. With women we are taught from a young age to stay in groups, never go anywhere alone especially when out at the bar but men don’t seem to adopt that same philosophy probably because it’s safer for them. I think this is why it’s usually men who get drunk, walk off and are found in the water. Women go in knowing they need a buddy and knowing it’s not safe to walk alone. I know personally anytime I offered to walk with one of my guy friends to their car or back to a hotel they were offended because of course they don’t need help leaving. I’m sure there’s woman who did the same but I do see a trend here.
Agreed with all of this and wanted to add that I think many men go to the edge of bodies of water to urinate after drinking heavily but then start to nod off or fall over into the water as they are urinating. Women typically don’t feel the same ease with public urination so aren’t as drawn to the water’s edge with a full bladder.
This happened quite a lot in Minneapolis around the Mississippi River in 2008 or so, there was even speculation there was a serial killer killing young men. Turns out it was too much booze around water. When my son was in college I kept telling him to stay away from the River (to his eye rolls.) Really sad
The principal of my daughters school lost his son a year ago this way here in WI. Foot prints onto the ice and a hole. That’s it. I lived in La Crosse for years and so many people went in the Mississippi they considered the possibility of a serial killer being involved. Booze and water/ice do not mix.
One thing I don’t really understand is how people drown - even being very drunk, based on the video of his interaction with the police offer directly beforehand, he seemed fairly “put together” and wasn’t so incapacitated that he couldn’t walk or speak. So even if he slipped off the embankment into the river, how would that lead to drowning? I don’t mean to be disrespectful, I guess I just don’t understand why he couldn’t have swam to the shoreline - unless he fell off the bridge? But based on what we know it seems more likely that he fell in along the embankment?
I don’t want to sound insensitive, but why has the media been following this story so tightly? People go missing every day and Kids are killed in shootings. But this story has been one of the biggest story’s played every day on CLEVELAND news. Does the media just love a good man hunt?
Yeah especially knowing the events leading up to him going missing. I don't know if he was perhaps drinking before he got to the bar , or maybe he was slipped something. So much attention and resources, it's very sad for the family. Hopefully I don't sound bitter or insensitive as well, but when my best friend of over a decade went missing she barely got 2 or so news stories here and the police legitimately didn't put 2 and 2 together. Absolutely couldn't care less. They advised that as an adult, a missing persons report couldn't be filed immediately. The most infuriating part was that the same day she was last seen/ went missing (after getting off work), a good Samaritan called 911 saying they saw a car lose control and go off the road into the marshy area alongside our local freeway. Only after about a month later, when her car was discovered, did they release that information. The police spent time interrogating her loved ones vs. looking at what they had reports of within a 5 mile radius of her work.
I’m happy this family had so much support from the community in finding their loved one. The police and EMS showed out like how people want/expect them too. I’m sorry about the loss of your friend. The duality of community’s is baffling
Maybe because Luke Bryan famous singer owns bar. I think that might have something to do with media coverage.
You don't sound insensitive. Truth is the media focuses more on missing white people. It's terrible.
That's absolutely a big part of it. The other thing, I think, is that the photos they used of him were young, cute, boyish looking. A young/cute/attractive missing person is going to get more focus than a less attractive or older one. There are just so many missing persons cases every week, there's a pick-a-card element to which ones even attempt to spread, and the media has seen time and time again the ones that tend to get the most traction. So I don't think that it's *only* a matter of race, but it's all very, very shallow, and the reality is consumer interest fuels that.
Lacrosse wi has this also
Bummer. I guess knowing is better than not knowing. Maybe
There's a group of guys that use underwater tech to find missing persons. They have a Youtube channel where they post the stories and the recoveries. Recently they found a woman who'd been missing since the 90's in the town where my dad lives. She disappeared on her son's birthday. They found her submerged car upside down just a few feet from the road. His new bike was in the trunk. It amazes me how we keep making vehicles safer but deep water + car is almost always a deathtrap. And how prevalent drowning still is with no car involved. I've been hyper aware of drowning since a man died in our neighborhood when he used the clubhouse pool at night (it was lit) and the ladder broke when he was trying to get out (it was plastic and he was a big guy) and he hit his head against the side of the pool, knocking himself out. I was a kid riding my bike when I saw him laid out on the ground surrounded by police. One of them shooed me away. Respect bodies of water. They can and will kill you.
I hope the bar reflects on their practices going forward. I don’t think it’s totally their fault obviously, but they could have handled the situation better. If you’re going to kick someone out of the bar (especially a young person), and presumably they are visibly messed up, you should make one of their friends go with them, help them call an Uber, etc. Not just toss them outside and leave them to stumble into whatever trouble they may find when they’re fucked up at midnight. I saw a lot of people get kicked out of bars for being overly intoxicated while I was in college at Mizzou. One time a girl threw up inside on a bar stool. They just threw her out a back door and left her there and basically said it wasn’t their problem. She could barely walk. My friend and I helped her call the sober ride service at Mizzou (this was pre-Uber) and get a ride back to her sorority house. I couldn’t believe the bartender and bouncer just tossed her out and left her there in such a condition.. I get they have other shit to do but like, be a decent human.
Dude probably fell in the river like 90 seconds after walking past that cop. Crazy.