by The father of missing British teenager Jay Slater said “I just want the boy back” as he visited the remote spot in Tenerife where his son went missing on Monday.
Speaking for the first time since the 19-year-old’s disappearance, Warren Slater spoke just one sentence through tears as he searched for Jay on the sixth day.
He spoke to the Telegraph after visiting the remote location in the north of the Spanish island where Jay went missing on Monday morning.
Along with his other son, Zak, and eight of Jay’s friends, Mr Slater visited an Airbnb cottage near the village of Masca that his son had visited after attending a music festival with friends.
‘I’m tired’
Earlier, Jay’s mother, Debbie Duncan, told the Telegraph: “I’m exhausted.”
“I haven’t slept in five days,” Miss Duncan said.
“I’m still optimistic. I’m not feeling negative yet.
“I don’t know what it was like today because I was advised to stay away because I would just break down.
“My boy might be up there somewhere.
“We are all devastated. He is just an ordinary boy from a small town in Lancashire. These things don’t happen.”
Speaking to PA, Ms Duncan said she did not know whether the Spanish authorities were rejecting the UK’s offer of help because they saw it as an “insult”.
Lancashire Constabulary said it had “offered support to the Guardia Civil to see if they require any additional resources”, which the Spanish authorities rejected.
“I believe they said they have enough resources and they don’t need help from the English police,” Miss Duncan said.
Asked what message she would have for her son, Miss Duncan said: “We just need you home – we just need you home.”
TikTok sleuths join the search
TikTok sleuths are flying from Britain to Tenerife to hunt down the teenager.
Jay was last heard from on Monday morning when he told a friend he was lost in the mountains and very thirsty.
He met two men earlier at a music festival on the Spanish island and followed them back to her cottage.
Police and mountain rescue teams are using dogs and drones to comb the barren landscape for the missing teenager, who is from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire.
At least five British nationals have spent hundreds of pounds each on plane tickets to make the nearly 2,000-mile trip to help in the search, despite having no relation to Mr Slater.
Paul Arnott, 29, who runs the TikTok account Down the Rapids and describes himself as an “explorer”, spent up to £400 traveling from Fort William, Scotland.
“It’s cost a few hundred pounds so far,” he told The Telegraph as he began his first day of the search on Saturday afternoon.
“I was trying to contact mountain rescuers during the day but I couldn’t get in touch with anyone.
“This is the area where he was last seen. The idea is ideally to communicate with the mountain rescuers and the police and if I can’t get an answer then I will do my own thing in this area and try to work out where there has not been a search.
‘I want someone to help me’
“If something were to happen to me, I would want someone to come out and help me. I believe what goes around comes around.”
Mr Arnott was assisted by Andrew Knight, 29, who lives in Tenerife and has lent cars to other British nationals who want to help in the search. Mr Knight said he knew five people who had come from the UK so far.
“The more people who watch, the better,” he said. “It’s a very scarred, difficult landscape. It’s hard to search and easy to get lost.”
The situation is very similar to the Nicola Bulley event in Lancashire last year, when dozens of social media enthusiasts descended on St Michael’s on Wyre to search for the missing mother-of-two.
More than half a million people have joined a group which has started posting bizarre theories online about Mr Slater’s disappearance.
Mr Slater traveled to Tenerife with two friends to attend the NRG music festival on Sunday. He left the festival sometime between 3am and 6am in the car of two other British men he met that night.
At 7.30am, he posted a picture on Snapchat showing him smoking a cigarette at the door of a cottage in Parque Rural de Teno, more than 30 miles from where the festival was held in the south of the island.
At around 8am, Ofelia Medina Hernández, the owner of the two-bedroom Airbnb property Mr Slater had traveled to, came across the teenager standing at a nearby bus stop.
He asked when the next bus was to Los Cristianos, a resort area where he was staying, and she said it wasn’t for another two hours. Instead of waiting, Mr Slater decided to walk.
After he left, he called his friend Lucy Law, who had joined him at the music festival, and said he was lost, thirsty, had 1 percent of charge left on his phone, and had cut his foot on a cactus .
His phone died shortly after the call. His last location was north of the cottage, near the village of Masca.
This is where much of the search has been focused over the past week. Mountain rescue workers, volunteers, drones, dogs and helicopters have so far been unable to find any trace of the teenager.
The search is now focused on two coves in a thick area with undergrowth and little protection from the sun.
The punishing conditions did not stop around 15 of Mr Slater’s friends and family members from flying out to help in the search. Some of them were even collecting cigarette butts in the hope that they will be useful.
His mother and brother have been on the island since Tuesday. “It’s traumatic and it doesn’t feel real. It’s horrible, it’s horrible,” Ms. Duncan said. “He’s a great person that everyone wanted to be with. He looks good, he’s a popular boy.”
Many others joined their efforts by posting on a Facebook page dedicated to finding Mr Slater, which had more than 468,000 members before it was suspended when conspiracy theories about his disappearance began to appear.
More than £27,000 was also raised through a GoFundMe page, set up by Ms Law to “bring Jay Slater home”.
Lancashire Police said on Friday they had offered to provide additional resources for the search but said the Guardia Civil had declined the offer because it “has the resources they need”.
