Jay Slater update: Missing teen’s mum says search has been a ‘living hell’

Hazel, who lives a few doors down from Jay’s family home in Oswaldtwistle, told the Echo how the local community watched Jay ‘grow up’.

‘I have lived on this street 16 years and they have lived here much longer than I have,’ she said. ‘I know his mum, his grandma was friends with my mum – my mum texted me last night and said: “I hope they find him.”

‘I have watched him grow up, he is a grand lad, a smashing lad, no problems.’

A local news reporter down in Jay Slater’s hometown of Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, has filmed the simple way locals are showing their support.

Liverpool Echo journalist Megan Banner says villagers are tying blue ribbons onto bollards and front garden gates, while others have made their Facebook profile pictures blue.

‘Everyone is talking about Jay, everybody,’ one local told Banner. ‘A lot of people know him, I knew his mum, all my family know them.’

A church in the Lancashire town Jay Slater is from is holding a service tonight to ‘show support’ for him and his loved ones.

West End Methodist Church in Oswaldtwistle has asked people to pop by from 7.30pm for the hour-long event.

‘With the worrying news about Jay Slater, we’re going to open tomorrow night for the opportunity for anyone to come to show support for him and the family and pray together,’ Matt Smith, a minister for the church, said on Facebook.

Friend Lucy Law has expressed frustration with the Spanish police while saying that the two festival-goers Jay Slater stayed with the night before he vanished have left Tenerife.

‘We need British police here. I just want to find my mate. He’s been missing three days. It’s not looking good now,’ Lucy told the Daily Mirror.

‘We feel as though it’s down to us to find him and that we’re doing more than the police.

“The police here don’t speak English and don’t even have a translator after three days. I feel like they’re fobbing me off. They’re still asking me the same questions as when I first reported Jay missing.”

She added: ‘The two boys that he was last with have left the country. They need to be questioned by British police.’

Lucy Mae, who had been holidaying with Slater and was the last known person to chat with him, has said she’s ‘convinced’ her friend was kidnapped.

Lucy told MailOnline: ‘It’s been three days now since he was last seen and the more time goes on the more I’m sure he has been taken.

‘At first, I wasn’t so sure but now I’m convinced.

‘He is not stupid – if he left the house on his own he would have walked to the road and then tried to flag a car down or stop someone for help.

‘The last time we heard from him it was around 9am so the place where he would have been walking would have had hikers and holidaymakers.

‘The more time passes and he has not been seen then the more we are convinced he has been taken by someone and is being held against his will.’

The ‘only official’ Facebook group co-ordinating a search effort for Jay Slater has reached more than 371,300 users.

‘Jay Slater Missing’ was set up by Rachel Harg on Tuesday, who says she has been discussing the search effort with Jay’s family.

The group has been flooded with well-meaning prayer emojis, screenshots from surveillance cameras and even people booking flights to the island.

Among the members is Lucy Law, who was the last to chat with Jay over the phone.

‘We need as many people as possible up there searching for him, please,’ she said in a post to the group earlier today.

‘We will be up there again first thing, however, a search party is going to be necessary to search everywhere as the area is very big. If you can help, please do, we need to get him home.’

Spanish missing people non-profit SOS Desaparecidos has re-released an alert about Jay Slater, describing him as ‘highly vulnerable’.

Jay Slater’s mum, Debbie Duncan, has said the search for her son has been ‘an absolute living nightmare’.

She told ITV News: ‘I wouldn’t wish this on anybody. I just want my baby back.’

‘I wish I hadn’t encouraged him to go to this. I should have said, “Don’t go to Tenerife”,’ she added of her ‘beautiful boy’.

‘I just think he was probably still in high spirits, buzzing – he’s not known where he is. He’s not known the extent of the long journey that he went on to get up there.

‘And he’s just thought: “I’m gonna walk.” And that’s what apparently he said to the last person he contacted.’

Lucy Law, the last person to speak with Jay Slater, has criticised the way Spanish police have handled the missing teenager’s disappearance.

She told the MailOnline: ‘I know they have had a helicopter and drones up but to be honest I think they could be doing more.

‘The other day I was on Veronica’s Strip in Los Cristianos and I picked up some information and I went to the Guardia Civilia and they said: “Who is Jay Slater?”

‘Can you believe that? It doesn’t really give you much confidence does it.’

A local volunteer firefighter crew has been roped in to help track down Jay Slater.

The team from Santiago del Teide, a town about 1.5 miles southeast of Rural de Teno park, was ordered to search for Jay at 2.17am yesterday.

They began by searching around Mirador de Ilda. By 2.38pm, 16 firefighters and four firetrucks were joined by police and friends and family of the teen, the fire station said on Facebook this morning.

A Facebook group for worried locals and Britons is organising searches around the hiring trail, which is believed to be Jay Slater’s last known location.

The group, ‘Jay Slater Missing’, describes itself as the ‘only official group’ on the social media platform.

According to posts, some have even booked flights to the Spanish island just to join in the search efforts. Local business owners and hoteliers have encouraged people to pop by for support.

Rachel Harg, an admin for the group, said she and other volunteers are ‘exhausted’ and said her ‘legs are dead’ from the search effort.

‘Tomorrow we go again and like I said, we will find him,’ she said in the post yesterday evening.

Another volunteer, a promoter for a local cheerleading squad, told the group: ‘Tomorrow the search continues bigger and stronger.’

Multiple fake fundraisers have been popping up in the last couple of days since Jay Slater vanished.

Now Lucy Law, a friend of Jay’s who was the last to chat with him over the phone, has created an official GoFundMe.

‘His last location was on an off-road track, which was a 10-hour walk from his hotel,’ she wrote on the page which has raised nearly £14,000.

‘The weather conditions up there are terrible for someone in shorts & a t-shirt, both in the day & at night.

‘He has no water for when it’s warm throughout the day, and he has no coat/suitable clothing for when it’s cold at night.

‘It was one degree and extremely windy when I was out looking in the middle of the night We are all so worried and we just want him home.’

Police received a tip yesterday that Jay had been spotted in a taxi between Playa de las Américas resort and the town of Los Cristianos, the Santa Cruz newspaper Atlántico Hoy reported.

But the man in the taxi was not Jay but a 19-year-old, with police resuming the search in Teno Rural Park.

Accrington and Rossendale College, where Jay was completing his apprenticeship, has released a statement on the student’s disappearance.

‘We are deeply concerned about the recent news regarding one of our apprentices, Jay Slater, who has gone missing while on holiday in Tenerife,’ the school said.

‘The safety and well-being of our students are of upmost important to us, and our thoughts at this worrying time are with Jay’s family and friends.’

• 8.35pm – Jay is seen dancing at the NRG music festival in a Snapchat video.

• Later that night, Jay goes back with two festival-goers to their home in the mountain village of Masca, just near the Rural de Teno Park,

• 7.30am – Jay posted his final Snapchat, an out-of-focus image of a hand holding a cigarette.
• 8am – The teenager leaves the flat.
• 8.15am – He rings friend Lucy Law, who he had been holidaying with.
• 8.50am – His phone’s last location is registered in the hiking spot.
• 9am – Lucy later that day reported Jay missing to the police.

• 2.30am – Jay’s mother, Debbie Duncan, is alerted of her son’s disappearance.
• She flies out to Tenerife to join in the search, which focuses on the hiking trail and the Masca ravines.
• 1.45pm – Specialist search crews are dispatched, including sniffer dogs, drones and helicopters.
• The Foreign Office confirms officials ‘are supporting the family of a British man who has been reported missing in Spain and are in contact with the local authorities’.

The authorities expanded the search to tourist hotspots Las Américas and Los Cristianos. Police sources told local media outlet Canariasahora that ‘no hypothesis is ruled out’ in the search.

Good morning. We’re covering the disappearance of Jay Slater, a teenage apprentice bricklayer whose last known location was a remote hiking trail an 11-hour trek from his Tenerife accommodation.

‘Kiss goodbye to your boy, you’re never going to see him again, he owes me a lot of money,’ Jay’s mum Debbie Duncan said she was told in a Snapchat message not long after touching ground on Tuesday to join the search effort.

While friend Lucy Law, who was the last to hear from Jay, revealed yesterday that she was told the teen was injured, without water and only had 1% phone battery.