The body of a University of Alabama student who disappeared early Tuesday in Barcelona, Spain, during a night out at a club was found Thursday evening, the Catalonian police said.
The cause of the death of the student, James Gracey, was under investigation, but a spokesperson for the regional police force said Friday that “everything points to an accidental death.” The spokesperson requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Mr. Gracey, 20, was visiting friends who are studying abroad in Spain and had gone to Shoko, a popular beachfront nightclub, before he disappeared, according to a statement from his family on Tuesday.
His body was found in the sea near the area where he was last seen, the Mossos d’Esquadra, Catalonia’s autonomous police force, said on Thursday.
In a statement, Mr. Gracey’s family said they were “heartbroken.”
“Jimmy was a deeply loved son, grandson, brother, nephew, cousin and friend, and our family is struggling to come to terms with this unimaginable loss,” the statement said.
“He was with friends but they got separated at the end of the night,” his mother, Therese Gracey, wrote on social media on Tuesday. She said her son’s friends lost touch with him around 3 a.m., and he never returned to the short-term rental where he was staying.
The police in Barcelona searched around Vila Olímpica, the neighborhood where Mr. Gracey went missing, and Alison Gracey, Mr. Gracey’s aunt, said in a phone interview on Thursday that the authorities had found his phone and wallet.
The police were going through his phone to examine his final text messages and calls and reviewing security camera footage to try to retrace Mr. Gracey’s steps in the area, which is known for its nightlife.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
David Gracey, Mr. Gracey’s uncle and a producer at CNN, told the news organization that his nephew had a return flight to the United States booked for Saturday.
Mr. Gracey, originally from Elmhurst, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, was the oldest of five children and an avid hockey player, his uncle told CNN. He was also a member of the Theta Chi Fraternity at the University of Alabama, where he was recently elected chaplain, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In recent years, several cases of U.S. college students going missing while abroad have drawn widespread attention.
Last year, Sudiksha Konanki, a 20-year-old biology student at the University of Pittsburgh, went missing during a spring break trip to the Dominican Republic. Her disappearance prompted an intense, weekslong search involving drones, helicopters, divers and boats, but she was never found.
In 2022, Kenny DeLand Jr. went missing in France before he turned up more than two weeks later in Spain. Mr. DeLand, a student at St. John Fisher University in Rochester, N.Y., at the time, had stopped communicating with his family, leading to a frantic search that included an Interpol alert, before he said he saw himself “in the news” and called his family.
Jonathan Wolfe is a Times reporter based in London, covering breaking news.
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