Almost two weeks since Brit teen Jay Slater vanished without a trace in Tenerife, police have formally announced they’ve called off the search. The 19-year-old went missing while holidaying with friends on the island for a rave festival. Jay, an apprentice bricklayer from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, had ventured back to an Airbnb with two men he met while out on the Sunday night, June 16, before trying to make the long journey back to his accommodation on foot. He called friend Lucy Law, with whom he had been staying on the Monday morning, to say he was lost and his phone had 1% battery. Jay hasn’t been seen or heard from since, with a major manhunt launched involving mountain rescue teams and volunteers. But that manhunt came to a fruitless end on Sunday when reporters turned up to the deserted viewpoint which, just 24 hours earlier, had been a hive of search teams and media. A well-placed source said that after almost two full weeks of combing the area, there was “nothing of relevance found”. The case has taken a number of tumultuous twists and turns over the past fortnight, with the likes of top Brit detective Mark Williams-Thomas heading to the Canaries to help. As the search reaches an abrupt ending, The Mirror takes a look at the major clues there have been so far in the case.
Cactus injury
During his phone call to friend Lucy, Jay mentioned he had cut his leg on a cactus. Civil Guard officers say this clue led to them to search a nearby ravine close to where his phone last pinged. Addressing reporters at a press conference at Mirador La Cruz de Hilda by the search site on Saturday, officers said: “Another thing that leads us to that conclusion is that when he was on the phone to Lucy, he got caught by a cactus and he was worried that they might be poisonous – she said, don’t worry, it won’t be poisonous – but for that, he had to have left the main road,” authorities said. “If you were walking along the main road you wouldn’t get pricked by a cactus. To do that, you would have had to have left the main road and be halfway up the mountain.”
‘Slipping on rocks’
Pal Brad Hargreaves also told how he thought he heard Jay “slipping on rocks” in their last phone conversation. Speaking to This Morning’s Isla Traquair, Brad said: “He was on the phone walking down a road and he’d gone over a little bit – not a big drop – but a tiny little drop and he was going down, and he said ‘I’ll ring ya back, I’ll ring ya back’ because I think someone else was ringing him. “If he was thinking like me, he would have gone back up and started walking on the path again… He wouldn’t have gone all that way down there.”
Phone data
Detectives have used Jay’s phone data to give a more precise location for the 19-year-old. Jay’s phone died at around 8.50am on the Monday morning near a hiking trail in Rural de Teno park, shortly after his phone call with Lucy. The Civil Guard said Jay was undeniably at the point being used as their search start point in Saturday’s press conference. They said: “We know to a certain science that he was here because the coverage of his phone its undeniable that he was around this point. And that’s where we have difficulties, because once you turn off your phone, it can no longer be traced. “So while he was walking – and we don’t know how long he could have walked for – with his phone switched off, no antenna is going to pick that up. And the technology we have – it traces phones, but not people. We have certain clues, and we have to stick to those.”
Snapchat
Another social media platform may hold vital clues over Jay’s disappearance. Shortly before going missing, Jay posted a picture of what appears to be a cigarette in his hand while on stone steps from the AirBnB in Masca village at 7.30am. Hours earlier, a video was posted to the platform showing Jay looking relaxed and happy on the Sunday evening. The clip, taken at around 8.35pm in the Arona area of Santa Cruz, Tenerife, shows the teen in a grey t-shirt with a green strip on the shoulders and sporting a black bag. The video, which was filmed by relative Isabelle Price, has since been shared in a Facebook group dedicated to finding Jay, which has clocked up more than 40,000 members. According to the caption: “This is a clear video of what Jay was wearing the night he went missing. All of our family and friends are so worried
