A holiday with friends took a dark turn and ended in tragedy for teenager Jay Slater.
The 19-year-old never made it back home from the trip after attempting a treacherous 14-hour walk back to his villa following a drug and alcohol-fuelled night out.
He ended up falling 25 metres down a ravine in the mountains of the Spanish island of Tenerife, an inquest into his death has now heard.
But at the time, in summer last year, a major missing person investigation was launched, as the teenager had appeared to have just vanished. It marked the start of a nightmare ordeal for his family and friends.
The search drew worldwide attention, as the authorities, Mr Slater’s loved ones, and amateur internet sleuths alike tried to piece together what had happened on that fateful night.
Now, details have finally emerged at the inquest into his death held at Preston Coroner’s Court this week.
Mr Slater, from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, had travelled out to Tenerife for what was set to be an exciting, party-filled holiday with his friends in June 2024.
One evening, the group decided to go to the NRG music festival at the Papagayo nightclub in the resort of Playa de las Americas. The club is at the end of Veronica’s strip, an area popular among British young adults due to its row of late night bars and cheap drink deals.
Bradley Geoghegan, who was on the holiday with Mr Slater, disclosed that his friend ended up taking ecstasy pills, cocaine and alcohol, as well as possibly ketamine, that night of 16 June.
After the event, in the early hours of the morning, Mr Slater joined two mysterious men to head to an Airbnb in Masca, a village in the mountains located miles away from his holiday apartment.
Ayub Qassim, who was later revealed to be one of the pair, said Mr Slater had asked to come back to the Airbnb apartment where he and friend Stephen Roccas were staying. Mr Qassim described Mr Slater as: “On a buzz. Chilled, happy. Mingling.”
He told the inquest he went to bed when they returned and could hear Mr Slater downstairs.
Mr Qassim was woken about an hour later because he needed to move his car and when he returned to the house Mr Slater was leaving and said he was going to catch a bus. Mr Qassim said he told the teenager: “Bro, there ain’t no buses coming here any time soon.” But Mr Slater left anyway.
When the desperate search was launched last summer, Ofelia Medina Hernandez told police that she had spoken to the teenager while he was on the road near Masca, and informed him of the bus times back to the resort region. However, she spotted him a short while later walking up the road at around 8am (BST). This was to be the last sighting of him before he disappeared.
It turned out Mr Slater had made the fatal decision to walk the 14-hour journey home instead, in rapidly rising temperatures.
He contacted his friends several times on his phone, telling them he was “in the middle of the mountains” and in need of a drink of water, but failed to identify specifically where he was.
Mr Geoghegan said he got a video call from Mr Slater, who was walking along a road and was still “under the influence”, the inquest heard.
Another friend, Brandon Hodgson, in a statement to Spanish police, said Mr Slater contacted him on a video call around 8.30am, showing him surrounded by mountains, with his phone battery down to 3 per cent.
Mr Hodgson said his friend was “laughing and joking” and got the impression he was “out of his mind”. He told police: “Jay is mentally very child-like.”
Another panicked friend, Lucy Law, called him, also around 8.30am, and had sent him a message, saying: “Go back to wherever the f*** you just came from before it gets boiling.”
She asked him what he could see, and he replied: “Nothing. Literally nothing. There’s literally just mountains.”
Ms Law ended up being the last person to ever speak to Mr Slater.
Shortly after their conversation, his phone battery ran out – and Mr Slater failed returned to the friends’ holiday apartment.
He was reported missing at 9am, triggering a nearly month-long large-scale search. Search teams scoured the rough terrain of the island for 29 days, moving through thick vegetation, and facing steep ravines and cliff-faces. Temperatures lurched to 30C heat before suddenly dropping, as sniffer dogs, helicopters and drones were called in to help.
On 15 July, they searched the treacherous Juan Lopez Ravine, which is described as having sheer cliffs and deep dense undergrowth. It was a little used area as it has no water and has to be accessed using machetes to cut through dense vegetation.
Mr Slater’s Armani bag was found there, with his phone, passport and nitrous oxide gas canisters inside. Around 20 metres below, his body was discovered, above a dry stream bed, around a three-and-a-half hour walk from the Airbnb.
The Spanish authorities said they could not explain why Mr Slater “took a chance” to leave the road to descend down the ravine in an area he was unfamiliar with. But the sea can be seen from the head of the ravine, and they suggested he may have believed he could reach a beach and get help.
Concluding a two-day inquest into his death on Friday, Dr James Adeley, senior coroner for Lancashire and Blackburn with Darwen, said: “Jay fell at a particularly dangerous area in difficult terrain.
He fell approximately 20 to 25 metres, suffering skull fractures and brain trauma from which he would have died instantaneously. Jay Dean Slater died an accidental death. This is a tragic death of a young man.”
Paying tribute to her son, Mr Slater’s tearful mother Debbie Duncan told the hearing: “He was very loved and our hearts are broken. Our lives will never be the same without Jay in it.”
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