Our son went lacking three months in the past – we really feel let down by police

The devastated parents of missing student Jack O’Sullivan say they have ‘lost complete confidence’ in the police force investigating their son’s tragic disappearance.

Catherine and Alan O’Sullivan, whose 23-year-old son Jack vanished after a house party in Bristol on March 2, feel they have been ‘badly, badly let down’ by Avon and Somerset Police and have now lodged a formal complaint.

They have even been forced to trawl through CCTV themselves which led to them finding crucial footage of a person they are adamant is Jack in week six – despite officers ‘inexcusably’ failing to notice a moving figure when they had the footage on day four.

After alerting police to this, the couple claim it took the force ten days to release the CCTV to the public, which they finally did along with a second new sighting – another piece of footage which detectives had first watched on day one.

The family, from Flax Bourton, North Somerset, also say police have been fixated with the theory that Jack may have entered the water – something his parents believe doesn’t add up.

Catherine – who has today released a new photo of the family in happier times at Jack’s graduation – told MailOnline: ‘I’ve never been in such a horrific situation. I mean, who on earth is faced with something like this?

‘But what’s happened to us is we’ve put our complete faith and trust in a organisation that have badly, badly let us down.

‘I think a lot of people are probably the way that we were before anything like this. You just assume that the police are there to do a job and that it’s being done properly.’

Filled with frustration, Alan added: ‘There’s mistakes made. There is CCTV… that identifies Jack in a different place to where the police think he was. The police failed to pick that up.’

As the investigation passed the 100-day mark this week, Jack’s family say they never intended to lodge a formal complaint but were slowly ‘becoming more and more aware of the mistakes’ and felt their concerns were not being addressed.

Jack went to school in Bristol before graduating from Exeter University and then returning to Bristol to continue his studies. He was living with his parents at the time of his disappearance.

The ‘caring and family-orientated’ student was at a house party with friends from his course in the Hotwells area of Bristol the night he went missing.

He left in the early hours of the morning of March 2 and mobile data shows that his phone was still in use at 6.44am – hours after he was last seen on CCTV.

The last confirmed sighting of Jack is at 3.13am as he walks onto a grassy area at the junction of Brunel Lock Way and Brunel Way, Bristol.

But while Catherine was going through CCTV herself, she spotted a person – who she is adamant is her son – walking over Plimsol Bridge at around 3.25am, heading back in the direction of Bristol city centre.

When police were alerted to this, they later uncovered a second clip showing someone walking along the Bennett Way slip road at around 3.38am.

Speaking about the 3.25am sighting, Catherine continued: ‘It is clearly a person. It’s not difficult to actually see that it is a person. And you know, looking at it carefully, it is Jack’s walk, it’s his gait.

‘We struggled to work out how a police officer could have missed this. It’s completely inexcusable.

‘To have that so early on would have, maybe it wouldn’t have changed the entire situation we’re in, but it certainly would have ruled a lot of things in or out.

‘We’ve just lost complete confidence in the people that are there to do a job that they clearly can’t. We’ve lost confidence in their ability.’

Alan added: ‘How do you think it makes us feel about the police?

‘Whichever way you spin it, you can’t get around the fact that that is a big error. Following that, then we wanted to see all CCTV, because we couldn’t trust the police to actually do it properly.

He also fumed at the fact Jack had not been added to the Missing People’s register – the UK charity for people who have disappeared – until he had been missing for more than two months because of an administrative error within the police force. 

Catherine added: ‘It was just an oversight. To be told that this is an oversight when it’s our child is is just not acceptable.

‘This isn’t a missing car, it’s a missing person.

‘The police have said to us, you may never find him, and you’re just going to have to accept that. Well, we can’t, and we’re not prepared to because there are too many outstanding questions that still remain to be answered.’

Jack’s parents say the police’s theory that he fell in the water ‘doesn’t hold up.’

‘We do appreciate that in the world people do go missing and they’re never found,’ she said.

‘And also we’ve been given all the statistics of people going into the water, and what possibly could happen. But this is not stacking up really, for the police at all.’

She continued: ‘I think what they did was they focused solely on one hypothesis… and they told us statistics of young males that have been on a night out in the vicinity of water would end up in water and they really really have stuck with that hypothesis.

‘But why we’ve questioned it continually is because there’s evidence that puts Jack walking away from water.

‘And also, more importantly, his phone [was] still connected. It [was] still in use. It [was] receiving data. It [was] transmitting data. And we’ve pleaded and pleaded to get some more technical expertise on this and they keep telling us they intend to.

‘But here we are a hundred and one days on and they’ve still not followed that through to the end of potentially the information they could get from it.’

Catherine explained that they knew Jack’s phone was still working at 6.44am but the CCTV was from 3am, adding: ‘Our question was ‘surely we should be watching footage way past 3am to try and ascertain where he might have gone?’

‘And I just think that they didn’t have the resources to go through it initially.

They explained how the police were happy to provide them with the footage and came to their house to install it on their laptop.

‘So I had it for myself, and it’s painstakingly hard to watch some of it, because it is very small and intricate, and you really could do with a professional to do it,’ Catherine said.

‘We were able to pick up Jack and when I did find him in a completely different location, Immediately I alerted the police to what I saw and even though the officer that was running it seemed to be in agreement and kind of accept what I was saying, the police then shut down for 10 days wouldn’t use this as a way forward.

‘Because I think they were more concerned with the fact I’d found it rather than they’d found it.

‘Our point was it doesn’t matter whose found it, he’s here. He’s heading in this direction.

‘We needed to alert the public… every day for us is another day of pain. But it was another day of wasted opportunity in terms of getting somebody to use their dash cam, or just remember that drive path that might have been in their minds.

‘As the weeks have gone by that’s bound to fade.’

They say they were informed last Saturday that the search may move towards Jack’s route home from Bristol – something the family say is ‘preposterous’ to only start doing 15 weeks after he vanished.

The family have now set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for a £20,000 reward for anyone who can give information leading to answers.

‘We’re desperately looking for someone to come forward with any information,’ Catherine says. 

They have also hired a missing persons expert called Charlie Hedges who has been assisting them in the investigation.

Mr Hedges told MailOnline: ‘Having to cope with a loved one going missing is extraordinarily difficult, living in limbo and not knowing what has happened. How do you go to bed at night, not knowing if they are going to come home? 

‘It is essential to have the confidence that everything that could be done to find them has been done and in this particular case, the O’Sullivan family has lost that confidence.’

Jack’s parents describe their son as ‘very kind, very caring, very loving, very family orientated’ and a ‘high achieving young chap with a really bright future’.

They are adamant he was heading home because he sent his mother a text at 1.52am telling her that he was getting an Uber and that he was safe.

Catherine said: ‘Jack always checked in wherever he was and regardless of whether he’d been at a party or had a few drinks, you’d always get, good correspondence from him.

‘And this is so out of character for something like this. It is really, really bizarre.

‘Police have said with missing people, it’s one of those things.

Well, this really isn’t one of those things for us.

‘He’s a really good good lad. I think if he, if he’d been in trouble, or if he’d been stuck, he would have phoned us.’

Summarising how she feels about the search for her son, Catherine said: ‘It’s extraordinary. It’s getting harder by the day. It’s hard to comprehend, really. I mean for us, time stood still.

‘For me, I feel like I’m on the very first day and we don’t really have a sense of day or time. It’s just it’s all that we can do really, to get through a day. It’s incredibly difficult.’

A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Police said: ‘We’ve received a formal complaint from the family of missing 23-year-old Jack O’Sullivan in relation to our investigation into his disappearance, which remains ongoing. 

‘The complaint has been recorded by our Professional Standards Department and will now be thoroughly assessed by a trained investigator. We’ll be updating his family as this assessment progresses. 

‘Detectives have carried out an extensive investigation over the past 100 days since Jack went missing. He was last seen in the Cumberland Basin area of the city in the early hours of Saturday 2 March after leaving a house party in nearby Hotwells. 

‘This investigation has included reviewing and re-reviewing more than 100 hours of CCTV footage, carrying out expert-led searches by land and water involving multiple teams, including the dog unit, drone unit and specialist dive team, proactively seeking and acting on advice from national policing specialists, and issuing multiple appeals to the public and media for information. 

‘Sadly, despite these efforts we’ve been unable to find Jack to date. We fully recognise the distress and anguish this has had on Jack’s family and our thoughts remain very much with them. We’re determined to do all that we possibly can to find the answers they so desperately need. 

‘We’ll continue to keep them updated on the investigation, as well as on the ongoing assessment being carried out by our Professional Standards Department.

‘We’d like to reiterate our appeal to anyone who was travelling in or walking around Cumberland Basin on Saturday 2 March, anytime between 2.30am and 5.30am, to contact us on 101 and give the reference number 5224055172.’