A British mayor who has joined the search for Jay Slater has laid bare the two major challenges the teen’s family are having to deal with during their search.
Shane Yerrell, the mayor of Waltham Abbey in Essex, travelled to Tenerife to support the desperate search for Jay, the 19-year-old who went missing in a rural northwestern area of the island.
Mr Yerrell, a mountaineering enthusiast who has previously climbed Kilimanjaro and Mount Olympus, described the conditions in which Jay’s family and friends are searching for their loved one.
He told the Mirror: “It’s really not easy. I struggled on the mountain and so did his family, but it didn’t bother them because their priority is powering through to find Jay.”
After mentioning the altitude and heat as the two factors making the search “really difficult”, he added: “You go over one edge and then there’s another bit. It’s unbelievable out there. It would take weeks or months to cover.”
Jay, from Lancashire, went missing on June 17. His last known location was Parque Rural de Teno, where his phone pinged before the battery lost power.
Sharing how he is helping the Slaters, Mr Yerrell said: “We spent the whole day Saturday scaling the mountain and then the same thing again on Monday on a different route.
“They are doing everything to find him. They’re not just out for an hour, they’re out all day 9.30am until 6pm. We covered miles, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover.”
Hours before he disappeared, Jay was partying with his friends at a club in Playa de las Americas in southern Tenerife, close to where his accommodation was.
He then decided to follow two British men to their Airbnb located near the Masca village, an hour-long drive from Los Cristianos where he was staying.
One of the two men, who has spoken with the Spanish police as well as with former British detective Mark Williams-Thomas, claimed Jay left the holiday rental at around 8am.
After walking out of the house, Jay is known to have called his friend Lucy and to have told her he was trying to walk back to Los Cristianos, he was without water, his phone was on one percent and had cut himself with a cactus.Â