Even though the body of the missing Missouri student, Riley Strain, has been found, it has hardly answered the questions about what happened to the 22-year-old on March 8, especially what went down at the bar he was asked to leave without his friends.
The MNPD has relayed that no “foul-play related trauma” was discovered on his body, but again, it is only the pending autopsy that will cancel out the possibility completely. Until that happens, Luke Bryan’s Nashville bar, 32 Bridge Food + Drink, remains the biggest piece of the puzzle, as it was the last place Riley was seen by his friends post which finding him became an impossibility.
Here is the simple timeline — he entered the bar with his Delta Chi fraternity brothers, but left it without them around 10pm, after the security team escorted him out.
What happened at the bar?
On the night of March 8, Riley and his friends visited multiple bars, but Bryan’s was the last one where they were all together. As per the statement released by TC Restraint Group (the one running the bar in question), he was served one alcoholic beverage and two waters before he was made to leave the establishment.
“At 9:35 p.m., our security team made a decision based on our conduct standards to escort him from the venue through our Broadway exit at the front of our building.
He was followed down the stairs with one member of his party. The individual with Riley did not exit and returned upstairs.”
As shared by Christopher Whiteid, Riley’s stepfather, with People, his son’s friends later informed him that they did try to leave the bar with the intoxicated Riley, but “the bouncers wouldn’t let them out with him, that they were trying to get their bill paid.”
Though the bar and TC Restaurant Group are cooperating with the inquiry by sharing everything from security footage to transaction records from the night, they are being investigated by the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) to find out if Riley was served alcohol by the establishment despite being clearly very drunk, which would violate the state law.
Concerns that Riley may have been under the influence of drugs given Nashville’s downtown’s rampant roofie problem — that has got the area labeled “unsafe” — have also been raised. Unless new evidence is unearthed, it is on the pending autopsy to answer these questions and give Riley’s grieving family the reason that took their son from them.
