Jay Slater’s family are set to take the dead 19-year-old’s body home with them from Tenerife, someone working closely with the family has revealed.
Matt Searle, the boss of the overseas missing persons charity LGB Global, revealed that Jay’s mum and dad, Debbie Duncan and Warren Slater, are making repatriation and funeral plans for their son - whose body was discovered on Monday morning (July 15). Jay had been missing since June 17 and is believed to have suffered a sharp "fall from height" before dying of his injuries., according to Spanish police.
Searle told the BBC that Debbie said she would “fall apart” if she is “not doing something”, after the family spent a month in Tenerife desperately searching for their beloved son. Footage released by Spanish authorities on Monday showed rescue workers using a helicopter to winch down a rescuer into the “inaccessible” ravine where Jay’s body was discovered.
Jay was found around a 20 minute walk away from where is phone last pinged on the morning of June 17, the Slaters’ family detective revealed exclusively to the Mirror. The Canary Islands High Court of Justice said the death was caused by “trauma consistent with a fall in a rocky area”, with officials adding that the body was “very deteriorated” and had several broken bones.
Distraught mum Debbie, 55, described her son as the “worst news”, and was in tears as she discovered the horrific fate of her son. "I just can’t believe this could happen to my beautiful boy. Our hearts are broken,” the heartbroken mother said.
Searle dished out criticism to the “armchair detectives” and “so-called experts” who had been using the teen’s disappearance to make “a name for themselves”. He plans to raise this issue with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, arguing that the sleuths online had in fact made the search for the missing teen more difficult.
Searle said: "If someone is missing, what parents will do is sit there and try to find every bit of information online, and there's been all this stuff that's been so hurtful for them. But as well as the parents, all this has a huge impact on the investigation. It's been unprecedented, and I think it has to stop. This behaviour is just not fair for the authorities or practitioners like ourselves, but most of all it's not fair for the families who are going through the worst time ever."
In 20 years of working with LGB Global to support the families of Brits who have died overseas, Searle says he has "never seen anything like this level" throughout thousands of cases. "It seems like it's ramped up recently and it's something I feel passionately about, something I am going to be talking to the Home Secretary about in the coming weeks," he said.
Theories about the teen’s whereabouts swarmed the internet as TikTok sleuths gave wild guesses on where Jay Slater was and whether anyone knew what had happened to him. In reality, it appears he accidentally fell into the ravine as he set off on an 11-hour walk through rough and rocky terrain, from an Airbnb in the north of Canary Island back to his accommodation.