Son refuses to give up hunt for mother, a year on
In a fortnight's time, Hong Kong businesswoman Carole Day will have been missing in the Philippines for one year and no one was any closer to finding her, her son said.
Day, 57, the widow of District Court judge Richard Day, who died in 2005, went missing on September 12 last year while on a business trip to Manila and has not been sighted since.
She was last seen by her business partner at an interior design showroom in Manila and was meant to leave that day for Cebu in the Philippines or Thailand, but failed to show up in either destination and, according to immigration records, has not left the country.
Her son, Jai Day, last saw his mother when he dropped her off at Chek Lap Kok airport on the morning of September 10. He has spent the past year in a desperate search for his mother, but it has all been to no avail.
'The Philippines' National Bureau of Investigation [NBI] has not been in contact since the beginning of the year,' Day said.
'From what I can gather the entire division has been replaced. I hope to perhaps contract a private investigator in the near future.'
Day, pictured with his mother, said there had been a few seemingly promising leads, but after following them up, none panned out.
'Basically, as much as I wish there was, there is not very much positive to report at the moment,' he said.
In an interview last year he told the Sunday Morning Post of his frustration when dealing with the NBI - a Philippine government agency under the Department of Justice responsible for handling and solving major high profile cases - who initially took two months to find his mother's iPhone, which had a Global Positioning System locator inside.
'The phone had been sold on a number of times and the SIM card had been changed, so it had been reformatted,' Day said at the time. 'They questioned a person who had bought and sold it on, but nothing came of it.'
Day, 25, had hoped that a 200,000-peso (HK$36,500) reward would bring new leads in the search for his mother, who ran her own interior design company, but so far nothing concrete has come to light.
Appeals for help had also been made in newspapers and on radio and TV stations in the Philippines, but the only responses he received were extortion attempts.
