Photo Gallery Unsolved mystery: No one knows why UTC student Ali Ali ended up dead on an island in the Tennessee River View 10 Photos

On a cold January day, 24-year-old Ali Ali walked away from UTC's campus and was never seen alive again.

The electrical engineering graduate student spent Jan. 5 in the most ordinary way — drinking tea with his roommates, checking on the status of the job he'd applied for on campus, talking with professors.

He'd been in Chattanooga for a few months — sent by his parents in Sudan to the United States to study — and he was a straight-A student. He'd just finished his first semester and his roommates thought he'd settled in well.

TIMELINE OF THE CASE Jan. 5 - Ali Ali, 24, goes missing. He is last seen leaving UTC’s campus around noon. Jan. 8 - Chattanooga police put out a missing person alert on Ali. Jan. 18 - Ali’s body is found on Maclellan Island in downtown Chattanooga. Police begin an investigation into Ali’s death. Jan. 21 - The hanging light fixture is collected for fingerprint testing. Jan. 22 - Police attempt to track down the origin of the hotel key found in Ali’s pocket. Feb. 13 - Investigators conduct a forensic evaluation of Ali’s electronics and sim cards. April 2 - Surveillance footage shows Ali walking away from UTC on the day he disappeared. April 19 - Hamilton County Medical Examiner James Metcalfe finishes Ali’s autopsy, concludes Ali died one to two days before his body was found on the island. Concludes Ali died from hypothermia. >May 6 - Police rule Ali’s death accidental and close the case. Sources: Chattanooga Police Department, Hamilton County Medical Examiner’s Office

But at some point that last day, Ali withdrew from his classes at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He walked off campus — security camera footage shows him walking west on Eighth Street at 12:10 p.m. — and disappeared.

No one saw or heard from Ali for 14 days, until five men camping on Maclellan Island, a half-mile swath of land in the middle of the Tennessee River in downtown Chattanooga, found his body on Jan. 18.

He was on the shore of the island, seated, legs out, with his back against a Veterans Bridge support column. His clothing was wet and muddy, and he had no shoes on — just black socks. His coat was zipped all the way up.

He'd left his black-and-red Converse shoes about 20 yards in toward the center of the island, with his blue Nike backpack. He'd pulled his iPad, calculator and notebook out of his backpack and laid them out, as if to let them dry.

Ali died from hypothermia, the medical examiner later concluded. Temperatures dropped to the mid-20s in the time before his body was found. Police ruled his death accidental and closed the case in May.

But the medical examiner estimated Ali had been dead for only one or two days before his body was found. No one can say where Ali was during the other 12 days he was missing.

No one knows how Ali ended up on Maclellan Island.

No one knows why he withdrew from classes.

No one knows why he went dark.

***

Police never found any evidence of foul play in Ali's death.

He wasn't stabbed, he wasn't shot, he wasn't strangled, he wasn't poisoned. He had no drugs in his system. His only injury was a broken right rib, Hamilton County Medical Examiner James Metcalfe concluded after a lengthy autopsy.

His lips, fingers and nose were scraped, but Metcalfe determined those injuries happened after he died. Ali's body was covered by water at some point after he died — the Tennessee Valley Authority controls how much water runs through the river, and at some point, the flow rose to cover all but half of Ali's face.

The abrasions on his lips were from fish nibbling at the flesh, according to his autopsy.

Ali was found slumped over on his left side, propped up against a rock. He wasn't wearing his glasses — thick black frames his friends say he wore constantly and couldn't see without.

Under his jacket, he wore a T-shirt and a button-down shirt, as well as pants, boxers, a black belt and socks — the same outfit he'd had on when his friends last saw him, two weeks earlier.

Ali didn't use his credit card while he was missing, and police have no evidence he was alive during the two weeks before he was found dead on the island, investigators say.

Some experts say there is no way to determine how long Ali had been dead.

"The biggest issue is because it was January and it was very cold, he could have been there for a long time," said Amy Gruszecki, a board-certified forensic pathologist at American Forensics, a private company in Texas. "There is no telling. It could have been two weeks or he could have been there for one day. There is no way to know."

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Gruszecki is not involved in Ali's case but reviewed the autopsy at the request of the Times Free Press. She said that without witness statements or other evidence to give a time frame for Ali's death, it's impossible to scientifically tell the time of death from the body alone.

"Without such information, autopsy findings to determine time and date of death are unreliable," she said, adding she doesn't know whether Metcalfe had such witness statements.

Ali's closest friends and roommates aren't satisfied with the official explanation of his death.

"The whole story for me was quite strange," said Haytham Saeed, Ali's housemate. "Things don't add up. Where was he? How did he survive for 12 days?"

***

Police started the case with several promising leads, according to the Chattanooga Police Department's investigative case file.

Detectives found a light fixture dangling from the Veterans Bridge near Ali's body and initially wondered if he'd grabbed it while either falling or jumping from the bridge.

Police collected the light fixture and tested for prints, but the test came back negative.

Detectives also found a parking ticket nearby dated in December 2014 and given to a Tennessee vehicle. But that turned out to be just a piece of trash, unrelated to the case.

Ali had a faded Hampton Inn room key in his pocket. Detectives visited every Hampton Inn in the Chattanooga area, but none had a record of Ali checking in. Ali's roommates told police he'd kept the key after a vacation in Tampa, Fla., a few months earlier.

Detectives also quickly ruled out the five campers as suspects. The men who found Ali's body first saw his backpack and belongings while poking around on a late-night hike after a few drinks. The backpack seemed suspicious, so they kept exploring and discovered Ali's body around 2:30 a.m.

Ali's electronics proved to be a dead end as well.

His phone wasn't with the other devices. Investigators tried to pull information from the iPad and two sim cards, but they had been corroded by water. All detectives could discover was where the cards were manufactured.

Earlier, before he was found dead, police at UTC and Chattanooga police had tried to track Ali through his iPad and cellphone, but were unable to because the devices were either turned off or broken, according to the case file.

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UTC police did manage to follow Ali's movements on campus that final day by tracking where and when he connected to campus WiFi, but lost track of him when he left campus around noon.

As the investigation extended, lead after lead took police nowhere.

And none of the evidence from the scene answered the two key questions — how did Ali get to the island, and where was he before he died?

So the investigation shifted to Ali's last hours.

***

Ali knew no one when he came to the United States to study, but he was welcomed into a tight-knit community of Sudanese engineering students, some of whom became his roommates.

They were the core of his social life, and when he wasn't studying, he was hanging out with them.

Ali was quiet, studious and happy, his roommates and friends say. He wasn't a partier, and he wasn't the one to lead the group. But if someone else suggested an activity, he usually joined in. The 24-year-old enjoyed watching movies and had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of films and actors, his roommates said.

They couldn't explain why he withdrew from classes, and said they didn't notice anything different about Ali the day he went missing.

"He was very normal," said Ammar Elhassan, Ali's roommate. "I didn't notice any change in him from day one until the day he disappeared."

Ali earned A's in the two classes he took during his first and only semester at UTC, said Ahmed Eltom, director of the electrical engineering program. Eltom told police Ali was "far and away" the front runner for a paid assistantship he'd applied for in the department.

One of the last things Ali did before he disappeared was to check on the status of his application for that assistantship. But a newly hired administrative assistant couldn't locate his paperwork, Eltom said.

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Ali's roomates said he didn't seem stressed about the missing application on the last day they saw him alive, and they didn't believe it was the kind of issue that would prompt him to do anything drastic.

Ali's death was not ruled a suicide, because investigators have no evidence to support that theory — or any theory on how Ali ended up on the island.

But if Ali did take a plunge into the Tennessee River before he ended up on the island — regardless of whether he jumped, fell or was pushed — he would have been significantly more susceptible to hypothermia, said John Watson, an emergency physician at Memorial Hospital.

"If he got in the water for any length of time, the water would make him get hypothermic rather quickly," he said.

If wet, Ali would have developed hypothermia within minutes and it would have been difficult to survive after a few hours, Watson said. If Ali had stayed dry, he likely still would have become hypothermic by the end of the night, he added.

Hypothermia starts with shivering, Watson said, and then progresses until the person becomes confused and possibly hallucinates. Eventually, a hypothermic person will become sleepy and sedate, he said. Blood pressure drops and the person's heartbeat becomes irregular and then stops altogether.

Usually people who start to develop hypothermia realize they're cold and get to a warm place, Watson said. Most severe cases happen when the patient is unable to get inside.

"He could have been trapped on that island," he said.

***

On a grassy hill near Airport Road, a mound of fresh dirt and four gray cinder blocks mark Ali's grave.

His headstone has yet to be installed. Ali was buried in a modest Muslim cemetery, among a handful of Muslims from other far-off countries like Bosnia and Palestine. His parents made the long journey to Chattanooga in May to see their son's final resting place.

They met with many of Ali's roommates and asked a few questions about how their son lived before he died. They asked if he was good to them, and whether he prayed.

They didn't ask about his death or his disappearance, didn't go to the police with questions, Ali's roommates said. They instead chose to accept that Allah had a plan for their son.

Mohamed Khalafalla, one of Ali's housemates, said that while Ali's father demonstrated acceptance and courage — in keeping with Sudanese tradition — Khalafalla couldn't imagine the man's pain.

"I don't know what's going on in his heart," he said.

Ali's roommates say losing their friend has changed them. In many ways, Ali's death brought them closer together, made them more supportive of each other. They're more open with each other about their problems, and they're also more cautious.

"Now, we say, 'Tell somebody if you're going out to watch a movie, walk downtown,'" Elhassan said. "'Tell someone where you're going.'"

At 9 p.m. every day for the last three-and-a-half weeks, the Sudanese community of UTC's engineering department has gathered together for a meal to break the fast of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month.

They eat, they laugh, and they talk about their lives.

They're trying to navigate the fine line of finding closure and moving on, but the cluster of unanswered questions that still surround Ali's death is ever-present.

"We don't know anything, this is the problem," Saeed said. "It's just left to your imagination what happened."

Contact staff writer Shelly Bradbury at 423-757-6525 or sbradbury@timesfreepress.com with tips or story ideas.