The mother of a Chicago woman who vanished while on a yoga retreat in the Bahamas traveled to the Caribbean country Wednesday to get answers as she revealed a puzzling new detail in her daughter’s disappearance.
The worried mother of Taylor Casey, Colette Seymore, revealed the same day that her daughter’s phone was found at the bottom of the ocean in an interview with CBS News.
Seymore said that the information about her daughter’s disappearance was not making sense and that she needed to be there in person to get answers and help search for her.
“You know, a mother’s intuition and answers I was getting just didn’t correlate, just wasn’t what I wanted to hear,” Seymore told ABC News.
“A young lady called me and said, ‘Have you heard from Taylor?’ And I’m like, I’m looking at the phone because I know she was from the yoga retreat … and then she said ‘Taylor hasn’t showed up for yoga classes.’”
Casey, 41, was last seen Wednesday, June 19, at the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat in the area of Paradise Island, according to the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
The yoga retreat center said that Casey never showed up to Thursday morning classes and alerted her family, local officials and the US Embassy in the Bahamas.
Seymore said she last heard from her daughter on Tuesday when she shared photos of herself swimming at the beach and the retreat center said she had attended classes on Wednesday evening, according to the news stations.
Emily Williams, a close friend of Casey, is also heading to the island nation to get some clarity on the current status of the case, telling ABC that they’ve received “sparse” updates.
“We want to make sure that they are taking this case as seriously as we are taking it,” Williams said of the local investigators. “And we know that we need to be there face to face so that we can get all the information that we need. And so that we can advocate fully for Taylor.”
Casey has been practicing yoga for 15 years and was attending the retreat to further her studies in the discipline. Her family said she was excited to return home to share what she had learned with her Chicago community.
The Royal Bahamas Police Force told ABC that it had met with the family on Wednesday.
“We need to know where Taylor is,” Williams told CBS. “We need to know what happened and we need the full story.”
The tourist vanished as a US State Department travel advisory for the Bahamas has been in effect since the start of the year. The department warned Americans to be careful while visiting the tropical paradise due to increased violent crime.
“Violent crime, such as burglaries, armed robberies, and sexual assaults, occur in both tourist and non-tourist areas,” the State Department states on its website.
Neither a representative for Casey’s family or the Royal Bahamas Police Force immediately returned an inquiry seeking more information on the discovery of her phone.