Bloomington Police issued an update yesterday, Sept. 21 2021 and it was to let people know they are still investigating the case.
“Send in tips, that’s why we gave Detective Jones’ number there. One thing we do is comb through digital evidence that could be a cell phone, laptop, cell tower, just a wide variety of digital evidence,” said Public Affairs officer John Fermon. “That’s a lot of where investigations are focused, which can take time.”
Fermon said a lot of times they have to do a subpoena or search warrant to obtain digital evidence.
“It’s been 15 days since our last update so we just wanted to update everyone, let them know where we’re at in the case and maybe develop some new leads if someone is still hesitant to reach out,” said Fermon. “Any social media account or any account that he has had that’s something we may have to specifically subpoena. We’re not giving any specifics on his case but generally if you have social media or a laptop or something like that, we would get a subpoena and look through those records. Especially in this case since it’s not a criminal case we’re gonna try to go the extra mile and see if we could find any information through that digital evidence.”
Fermon said a little while back there was a certain software developer that had a difference in the time frame and Jelani’s family was reaching out to that company as well.
“There’s a lot that goes into it and a lot of people ask what we’re doing all the time and what we release is a sort of general idea of what we’re doing,” said Fermon. “We don’t want people to know every single investigation technique that we use, this isn’t a criminal case but it is the same type of thing we do during a criminal case.”
Fermon said they will not release any specific conversations with anybody if it’s not important to the circumstances surrounding his disappearance.
“It’s a missing persons case, unlike juveniles where if you run away it’s technically a crime, when you’re an adult it’s not a crime to go missing. You can make a missing persons report at any time and our police department will investigate it. There’s no crime with a missing person’s case on face value. If somebody went missing for a couple days and came home we would just verify it, there’s no crime associated with it,” said Fermon.
Multiple people reported Day missing. Including his family, ISU and the ISU police department.
“It was a bit of a coordinated effort and we ended up taking the missing persons report, and speaking to the family initially on Aug. 25 at around 9 p.m. On Aug. 26 that’s when the car was located and there was an initial search in Peru,” said Fermon.
Fermon said BPD keeps constant communication with Day’s family members, to try to update them on their efforts and vice versa.
“We need the support of the community and his family. If he returns home or calls them, a friend confides in them some information, it’s mutually beneficial for us to communicate,” said Fermon. “A case can go cold if we don’t have any active leads or active investigations in it, but we are not at that point. We still have leads being followed up by our detective, doing follow ups, trying to talk to people. So we are not at the cold case part.”
BPD, Peru Police and the LaSalle County coroner’s office are investigating a body found in early September.
“There was a body that was located, we are still waiting on the DNA identification. It could be him, it could not be him, we are investigating Jelani’s case and the found body as separate cases,” said Fermon. “While trying to support the family. So that information could be important later.
In terms of the car that was found…Fermon said releasing details about it doesn’t help locate him and if there was some sort of criminal aspect we wouldn’t want that out there.
Day’s Chrysler 300 was discovered in a wooded area covered up with brush in Illinois on Aug. 26. He was last seen at Beyond Hello, a dispensary in Bloomington.
Ashlynne Swan contributed to this story
