It’s been more than two and a half weeks since Jay Slater was seen, and now a new theory could explain the remote location of the missing teen’s last phone ping
A new theory has emerged about Jay Slater’s whereabouts and could explain the GPS location of his phone.
The 19-year-old apprentice bricklayer, who vanished on June 17 in a remote area of Tenerife, has still not been found after 18 days of searching. The Lancashire teen disappeared while holidaying for a three-day music festival with friends, after he left them to travel to a quiet Airbnb with two other partygoers in the early hours of the Monday morning.
Jay began the treacherous 11-hour trek back to his accommodation, located in the south of the island, on foot after missing the first bus of the day. His phone last ‘pinged’ somewhere in the Parque Rural de Teno nature reserve, where Spanish police focused their search before they officially called off their search on Sunday. His loved ones have continued the hunt.
A journalist covering Jay’s case in Tenerife, who had spoken to Spanish police and sleuths on the ground investigating his disappearance, has now highlighted a new theory that could explain why the teen’s phone last pinged in a dangerous mountainous area. After having a conversation with an ex-British Army officer, reporter Nick Pisa believes Jay’s phone may have been thrown.
Pisa said the mobile’s GPS location could only be possible “if the phone was thrown” into the terrain. He told GB News: “We’re not obviously being kept up to speed, but [the former officer] did tell me that he thought where the ping came from was rather surprising because it was really steep to get to, and it was covered in undergrowth and cacti.
“He said to get there you’d have to need a machete. Or he suggested, someone had thrown the phone into that growth.” Pisa revealed that expert climbers are “still searching with the backing of Jay’s family”, despite the Civil Guard’s active search ending. The reporter added of one: “I must admit, I’ve seen him up there several times, and he seems to be the more serious.”
Jay’s friend Lucy Mae Law, who travelled with him to the Canary Islands, was one of the last people to speak to him around 8am on the morning he went missing. He rang her to tell her that he was walking back to their accommodation after missing the bus and said he was thirsty, tired, cut his leg on a cactus, and only had 1 percent phone battery.
In an interview on July 18, Lucy said: “He’s gone on a night out, he’s gone to a friend’s house, someone that he has met on holiday. One of the people he has met has hired a car out of here, so he’s driven them back to his apartment and Jay has gone there not realising how far away it is. He’s ended up out in the middle of nowhere.
“Jay was obviously thinking he would be able to get home from there. But then in the morning he’s set off walking, using his Maps on his phone and ended up in the middle of mountains with nothing around. He rang me at about 8 o’clock morning saying his phone was on 1 percent. He said ‘I don’t know where I am, I need a drink and my phone is about to die’.”
The young woman managed to locate the Airbnb on the day of his vanishing, after using markers in Jay’s last Snapchat image. She approached the two men who were still inside the property. She said: “We managed to find the house. I knocked on the door and there were two people there.” They said Jay had gone out for a cigarette before going back in and saying he wanted to go home.
“They told me he’d spoken to the next-door neighbours and they’d told him there was a bus every 10 minutes back down to Los Cristianos,” said Lucy. “The bus stop was right next to the house. So obviously if he’d gone to get the bus he wouldn’t have got lost because it [the stop] was visible from the front door.”
