'Find Jack' Family of student missing for nine months still needs answers

If you live in Bristol or the surrounding area, chances are you know Jack O'Sullivan's face. The missing 23-year-old's image features on billboards and posters across the city and north Somerset, all featuring a simple plea in stark red type: "Find Jack."

- Jamie Grierson

The lives of his mother, Catherine, his father, Alan, and his older brother, Ben, have been turned upside down by his disappearance in March and the efforts they have made since then to learn his fate, efforts they say have not been helped by the police.

"In the week after he went missing, the police told us: 'We believe Jack's fallen into the water, he's drowned, and there's a chance you'll never see him again.' They told us that in a phone call," says Catherine O'Sullivan. "But it became very apparent that they had based that on statistics rather than any fact at all. There was nothing, there was no sighting, there was nothing that they could tie together. So they just resorted to a national statistic." Nine months later, Jack remains missing.

After graduating from the University of Exeter with a degree in history, Jack was living at home with his parents in Flax Bourton, north Somerset, and studying for a law conversion course.

On 2 March, Jack set off at about 8.20pm, taking the bus to Bristol to meet three friends at a Wetherspoon's, before moving on to a party in a flat at 11pm in the Hotwells area.