‘Time has stood still’ Jack’s family still desperate for answers
IT has been four and a half months since Bristol student Jack O’Sullivan left a party in Hotwells and didn’t make it home. The posters sharing his face are fading on the lampposts around the Cumberland Basin, as family and friends continue to print more, organise more searches, keep awareness up and communicate with the police.
Last week the area’s new MP Carla Denyer shared the family’s appeal widely on social media, amid growing frustration and a desperate fear among friends, family and the strangers who have dedicated their time and energy to finding out what happened to him, that Jack may never be found and, possibly worse, in the meantime, people will forget about him.
For the parents of the student, who is now 23, the living nightmare of a missing child has been joined by a frustration – that the police aren’t doing enough, that the media have forgotten about him, that someone out there knows what has happened to Jack, but isn’t saying.
It’s a frustration made worse by the regular mass media and viral appeals to solve other mysteries of missing people – each one often as heartbreaking as the last, each one producing an army of armchair internet sleuths poring over the evidence, theorising and speculating remotely. That has happened, in a small way, with Jack’s disappearance, but nothing on the scale of what the nation saw with Nicola Bulley, the mum who disappeared walking her dog in Lancashire at the start of 2023, and was later found to have accidentally drowned in a river.
Most recently, the social media frenzy over the disappearance of Jay Slater in Ibiza, mirrored by a huge number of reports from traditional news media, has left those in Bristol and North Somerset trying to highlight Jack’s disappearance, frustrated.
Jay Slater’s mystery was, tragically, solved and for all the wild speculation, his fate appears to have been a simple one, like Nicola Bulley’s. For the families, at least, there is the closure of knowing, something Jack’s family and friends, don’t even have.
Jack’s family have gone from daily, almost hourly, communication with the police, to a weekly email update on the progress of the investigation into his disappearance. The family have been so frustrated, they have lodged an official complaint against Avon and Somerset Police for their handling of the case, and, effectively, have started their own, after well-wishers, supporters and complete strangers donated tens of thousands of pounds to an online crowdfunder.
The money has enabled a £20,000 reward to be put up for information that leads to Jack being found. The amount raised has sailed past that, and is currently well over £31,000, which has enabled the family to think about what
they can use it for to help find him.
That means the regular printing of fresh posters, flyers and leaflets, the creation of a website that contains pretty much all the information about Jack, his disappearance and what’s happened since, but will also now mean hiring a specialist firm of investigators to ‘advance the search for Jack.’
Jack’s mum and his family are, like almost everyone, not exactly used to launching and running major publicity campaigns. “It is very out of character for us to have to do anything like this,” she said, earlier this month.
“I’ve never had to speak out before or go on social media doing what we have to do but then you feel if we don’t nobody else is going to.
“We have been in this position now for 18 weeks. At the start we didn’t create a lot of fuss or noise because we just assumed that the police were handling it all and you just accept things. I think we got that a little bit wrong through no fault of our own, just trying to do the right thing,” she added.
Milestones are beginning to pass since that first weekend of March, the worst of which was Jack’s birthday as he turned 23. That night in March when he vanished was a chilly one, with sleet falling across Bristol. Now, it’s the height of summer.
“It’s getting worse and worse for us. We’ve changed seasons and now we are in the summer,” Catherine added. “You just can’t believe it. Time has stood still. I am still on March 2. I can’t go forward at all. We have to somehow find a way because we owe it to Jack. If his brother was missing Jack would move heaven and earth to find him so we must try. He never ever takes no for an answer and ‘determined’ was his middle name,” she added.