Sometimes, Bek Morris’s heart skips a beat when she passes someone in the street – someone who could be her brother.
“[It might be] someone who has a similar face, or looks the same from behind,” she says.
Jason Mazurek has been missing for almost 20 years. On 15 September 2002, he went to the local hockey grand final, before going home to get ready to go out with friends and one of his sisters, Jessica. Another sister convinced him to leave his phone at home, because he was forever losing it.
They went out to the Wrest Point Casino in Sandy Bay. When they decided it was time to leave, Jason waited in the foyer while Jessica went upstairs to look for friends. When she came back, he was gone. Video footage showed him leaving at about 2am.
He was wearing stonewash jeans, sandy Colorado shoes and a white short-sleeved shirt.
He walked out of that casino, and disappeared, and became one of thousands of long-term missing Australians.
In a video on the Australian federal police’s missing persons site, a picture of a young Jason shows a bright-eyed boy with dark lashes and what looks like a home-job haircut. In another, he grins, smart in a little chef’s jacket. In others, he’s with his sisters.
“He was the second-eldest with five sisters,” Morris says. “And it was just mum most of the time. He tended to take on the male type roles.”
She has fond memories of growing up in the country outside Hobart. Summers swimming at the local pool, riding around on pushbikes, rollerblading. “Normal kids’ stuff,” she says. “Just mucking around.”
His sisters describe him as protective, with a kind heart and soft nature. The kind of guy who would bring home a big Christmas tree, or buy his mum a red rose on Valentine’s Day.
On the AFP website, after those cute kid photos, there’s his official “missing” photo, a man with stubble, broad shoulders, brown hair, brown eyes.
Today, he would be 39. Morris, 36, worked with the AFP’s forensic artists to create the latest photo, an “age-progressed image” of what Jason might look like now. “It’s definitely a bit confronting … a lot of work back and forth looking at old photos to get to that point,” she says.
Jason is one of seven Australians being profiled by the AFP for Missing Persons Week, which runs until 7 August.
More than 140 people go missing in Australia every day. “Missing” means not just that their whereabouts are unknown, but that there are “fears for the safety or concern for the welfare of that person”.
More than 98% are found, and most of those are found alive and well.
Once someone is missing for more than three months, they are classified as a long-term missing person. There are about 2,600 long-term missing persons in Australia.
AFP National Missing Persons Coordination Centre coordinator Jodie McEwan says the campaign for National Missing Persons Week 2021 shows how those missing might look today.
“It is hoped the images, some of which show how a person may look more than 40 years after going missing, provide the community with an updated idea of who we continue to search for,” she says.
“The seven people who will be featured throughout the week all have families who continue to wait for answers. They are sons and daughters, parents, siblings, colleagues and friends.”
The home affairs minister, Karen Andrews, says if the “advanced imagery and world-leading forensic artistry can provide answers to just one family, this initiative would be a great success”.
Along with Jason, there’s Suzanne Lawrance, chubby-cheeked and blonde, then all 80s chic. She was 16 when she went to a birthday party in Healesville, Victoria, in 1987. She hasn’t been seen since. She would be 51 now.
In a teenage photo, Nathan McLaughlin’s neat hair is slicked to the side. At 17, he flashes a cheeky grin. He left his Northern Territory home in March 1994 on his racing bike. The bike was found but he never has been. He would be 45 now.
There are so many more still missing. High-profile cases such as the Beaumont children, who went missing in Adelaide on Australia Day 1966. William Tyrrell, who went missing in 2014 and would be 10 now. Then there are the thousands of lesser-known cases.
Anyone can go missing, and the AFP lists possible reasons including mental illness, miscommunication, misadventure, domestic violence and being a victim of crime.
It also lists groups that are more at risk, including children and young people, people with a mental illness, the elderly and those living with dementia, people who express suicidal thoughts, and people living with an intellectual or physical disability, or without lifesaving medication.
According to a definition used by the AIC, missing people sit on a continuum that ranges from “intentional”, to “unintentional” – but even those who decide to leave, may not have felt they had a choice.
With Jason, Morris says there’s nothing the family can think of that would explain his disappearance.
And she says it doesn’t get easier, because having her own children made her think more about how her own mother has felt over the years.
“I can’t imagine what Mum has gone through … and I think our hearts break a little more for her as time goes on.”
After all these years, she says, just having some answers would help.
“It’s the unknown that makes this really difficult,” she says. “When someone passes, you go through that process. You mourn, you have answers. You know why they’re not there anymore.”
The family is grateful that Jason’s case was picked for the AFP campaign this year, and hopeful that someone might come forward with more information.
“But we’re really conscious that there are so many people who are long-term missing, not accounted for, and behind all of them are family, friends, people looking for answers,” Morris says.
Australian Institute of Criminology statistics show that, across Queensland, NSW, Tasmania and the ACT, 17,843 people went missing. A total of 17, 389 (almost 98%) were found alive – 107 (0.6%) were found dead.
A total of 347 people were still missing.
Their families and loved ones are less likely to tack “MISSING” posters around town, now. There are Facebook groups dedicated to the search, and a swag of private investigators promising to help if the police can’t. And the AFP recently set up a national DNA program, which is trying to put names to unidentified remains. The “ill-gotten wealth” of criminals has been put to use trying to match living relatives to about 500 sets of remains across the country.
Asked what she would do if, one day, that person she passes in the street turns out to be Jason, Morris hesitates.
“I don’t know,” she says. “We don’t think he would just get up and leave, leave his family behind without any answers. We’ve never thought that he voluntarily went missing. So we don’t think about him coming back.”
If you have any information you think could help, call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
If you need help, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
