Family members of Elijah Weatherspoon have taken to social media to express their frustration with the Mount Pleasant Police Department in South Carolina after the 18-year-old's body was found in the Cooper River on Sunday.

Thousands of people have signed Change.org petitions calling for investigators to look into the strange circumstances surrounding the teenager's death.

Lauren Jackson, a friend of Weatherspoon's aunt, created one of the petitions and wrote that on the night of June 25, the teenager was with seven friends on a boat. Weatherspoon was the only Black person in the group of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina teens.

Weatherspoon ended up in the water and went missing. The Coast Guard and local police spent the weekend searching for him and eventually found his body on Sunday, WCSC reported.

The stories relayed by family members vary greatly because the people on the boat had differing stories about what happened to Weatherspoon before he went missing.

"The events leading up to his death are unclear and are being treated as if he was just another black man who couldn't swim and drowned. When, in fact, he can swim. The people who were with him have stories that do not match up," Jackson wrote in the petition.

"He fell off the boat and hit his head on a rock. He fell off the boat and his friend tried to save him and couldn't. He jumped off the boat himself and refused to get back in and drowned. Those are just some of the circumstances his family has been told. The police will not investigate further and the local news is no longer reporting on Elijah," she added.

There are also multiple social media posts where family members of Weatherspoon discuss some of the many stories they have been told. One of the key points they all hone in on is the fact that the people on the boat waited nearly an hour to call 911 when it was clear Weatherspoon was in the water and had not come back.

Elijah-Weatherspoon

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