After more than three months of few answers from local authorities, the FBI is joining a task force in offering up to $10,000 “for substantial information” leading to a new witness or evidence in the death of a Black Illinois State University graduate student. The FBI’s Chicago Field Office announced the reward for Jelani Day on Monday in its effort to assist the Peru Police Department in Illinois. Day was reported missing on Aug. 25, 2021 after he didn’t return messages from a professor and his family, the FBI’s Chicago office reported. “Subsequent investigation determined that Day was last seen the morning of August 24th at a retail establishment near the intersection of Veterans Parkway and General Electric Road in Bloomington, Illinois,” officials said in a poster announcing the reward. “His body was discovered on September 4, 2021, in the Illinois River in Peru, Illinois, and positively identified on September 23, 2021.”

Day’s family has enlisted the help of prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump in calling for the FBI to investigate Day’s death as a hate crime, WGLT reported. Crump told the NPR affiliate he can’t conclude that a hate crime led to Day’s death, but it’s not an illogical leap. “So, somebody killed him,” Crump said. “Then you go to well, what’s the motivation for killing him and who is likely to have killed him in that town? We know the demographics are there are very few Blacks who live in that town.” Crump said nothing he’s seen in the case adds up to suicide, an explanation Day’s family has accused local authorities of forcing on them. “What it is more akin to is homicide,” Crump said.

Two days after Carmen Bolden Day, the late student’s mother, reported him missing, his car was found in a wooded area of Pery, Illinois, with its license plate taken off, WGLT reported. Over the course of a few days, authorities began to recover his personal items miles from the car. Day’s body was found about a mile from the car. Crump told WGLT the timeline doesn’t make sense. “A young Black man who was beating all the statistics, all the odds, pursuing a Ph.D. And then one day they tell you he was found naked in a river?” he asked. Day was wearing a T-shirt, underwear, and a black sweatshirt around his waist when a coroner conducted an autopsy on him, WGLT reported.

Bolden Day told WGLT she never believed her son would harm himself and that she felt like she had to tell a detective he was suicidal in order for authorities to do their job. “The Bloomington detective, Paul Jones, had told me that in order for them to start even doing anything, I had to not only report him as missing, but for them to get started I had to say, like, Jelani had suicidal tendencies for them to even start doing their job,” the mother said.

She admitted that she said what she had to in order for authorities to take her son’s case seriously. “There will be change in how they look at us. How they handle us. How they make efforts to help us,” Bolden Day told WGLT. “Jelani’s life will not be in vain.”

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