‘Leave Jay Slater’s mom alone,’ Sarah Vine says on THE REACTION
Sarah Vine has called on online sleuths and conspiracy theorists to leave the family of missing Jay Slater alone during their time of need.
Speaking on the Mail’s talk show The Reaction, Vine and Andrew Pierce discussed the latest developments since the 19-year-old went missing on the Canary Island of Tenerife more than a week ago.
He vanished without trace on the morning of Monday June 17 after enjoying the last night of a three-day rave at the Papagayo Beach Club in the party resort town of Playa de las Americas.
After going back to an Airbnb near the remote village of Masca with two men he had met on holiday, Jay was last heard of when he phoned his friend Lucy Law at 8.50am to tell her that he was ‘tired, thirsty and disorientated’ with only one per cent battery on his phone.
And as the country searches for the missing teen amateur sleuths have flown out to Tenerife to try and find him – in a cruel echo of the Nicola Bulley case.
And as TikTok influencers and adventurers – equipped with hiking boots and camcorders – film themselves trekking through mountain scrubland, Ms Vine condemned the group as ‘vultures’.
The last confirmed sighting of Jay Slater (pictured) was at around 8am last Monday by a woman who had told him the bus was due at 10am when he asked
School finance officer Debbie Duncan, 55, told MailOnline she’s at her wits’ end with worry
She said: ‘These are not straightforward places. But the thing that I can’t stand is this awful picking over people’s misery for money, these kind of vultures, you know, just sort of, it’s not, it’s not okay, it’s not, it’s a very unpleasant human trait.’
Throughout the episode Vine speaks of her own ‘frightening’ experience when her teenage son visited the island last year.
‘I remember last year there were loads of cases of young lads, sort of his age, getting attacked on holiday because there’s a huge anti-tourist sentiment, especially in places like Tenerife, and it is kind of run by gangs. They’re not very nice.
‘These lads are young, they’re naïve, they think they’re big men, they’re not. They do stupid things and they end up in all kinds of predicaments they shouldn’t be in, or get too drunk, or they are take something and don’t know what they are doing. …
‘It sort of happened a bit to my son last year. He went on holiday after his A Levels and got separated from his group. The first rule of going away when you’re young, is never get separated from your friends.’
Vine’s son then ended up paying for a taxi ride home alone but the driver asked for more money, which he did not have.
‘He locked the doors and drove him to a different part of town. And then I got this really scary phone call. It was really frightening for him and me. We were lucky. It was a lesson that he learned,’ she added.
Vine added that her son noticed a lot of girls being ‘targeted by local blokes who were very nasty’ and ‘threatening’.
Jay, an apprentice bricklayer from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, vanished on Tenerife on Monday June 17
Specialist police dogs have been brought in to help with the search for Jay Slater nine days after he went missing
A search team near the last known location of Jay Slater, near to the village of Masca
She continued: ‘He said afterwards that on that holiday, quite a lot of the girls, particularly, were being targeted by by local blokes who were, you know, very nasty, threatening to do all kinds of stuff.’
It has been ten days since Jay went missing and police still have no idea where he is. Today, emergency services were using helicopters and drones to search a specific area of Masca, where Jay’s phone last pinged.
Friend Lucy Mae Law, 19, said he left with two mystery British men and later sent her two Snapchat images of himself at an AirBnB which they had rented in the remote village of Masca, an hour from Playa de las Americas.
At 8.50am Lucy says she last had contact with him and he told her he was ‘lost in the mountains, with no water and one per cent battery,’ he added he had also cut his leg on a cactus.
Earlier he had told her he had missed a bus back to Playa de las Americas and was going to walk back, and a local in the village has told MailOnline that she saw him twice.
The first time was to tell him the time of the next bus, 10am, and then fifteen minutes later when she saw him walking the wrong way up a hill towards the isolated and rugged Masca gorge.
A picture of missing teenager Jay Slater shows the 19-year-old in a nightclub in the early hours with his female friend Lucy Law just hours before he disappeared in Tenerife
Warren Slater (pictured with Jay’s brother Zack) said although some officers had been ‘brilliant’, he was becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of communication from others as he desperately tries to find his 19-year-old son
Lucy said she raised the alarm at 9am but local police have told MailOnline they were not alerted until later in the afternoon on June 17 and pointed out they would not have launched an immediate search without significant time passing.
Then on Saturday Jay’s mother Debbie Duncan, 55, said a man had come forward claiming to have seen Jay by the church in Santiago de Teide at 6pm on Monday – some ten hours after he vanished.
Later a grainy image of what appeared to be a male was released by the family.
The family are clinging to hope that the male in the CCTV walking across the square in front of the San Fernando Rey church in Santiago del Teide is Jay.
NOW LISTEN TO THE REACTION
Sarah Vine and Andrew Pierce bring their own no-holds-barred opinions, insights and reaction (clue is in the title) to the biggest stories of the week. New episodes every Wednesday.
The Reaction with Sarah Vine & Andrew Pierce, now available as a podcast or on YouTube
