Jeremy Vargas' mum tells how he vanished like Madeleine McCann
15/02/2008
Jeremy (Pic:Phil Spencer)
EXCLUSIVE Jeremy Vargas vanished just eight weeks before Madeleine McCann. Here his distraught mother tells how she believes her little boy is still alive and why police think their disappearances could be linked
A bandoned in the gutter of the quiet street, the little yellow bucket could have been dropped by any small child or harassed mum.
But for Ithaisa Suarez, the toy meant something much more significant - it was the last link to her little boy. A final reminder of the moments before seven-year-old Jeremy disappeared.
He went missing just eight weeks before Madeleine McCann while he was playing outside his home in Gran Canaria.
Now police in Spain and Portugal are trying to link the cases of various missing children to that of Maddy, including Jeremy's.
His mother is convinced there must be a connection and hopes to finally get answers about her son's case, almost a year after he disappeared.
Ithaisa, 24, vividly remembers the last time she saw her son. "I came back from the shops with my mother and saw Jeremy playing alone, filling his yellow bucket with soil as he liked to do. I said 'come in because we are having lunch soon'.
"But he stayed a little longer and when we went to call him in a minute later he had gone.
"When we realised he was gone we all went screaming in the streets, we rang doorbells of neighbours to see if he was there and more people came down to join in the search until there were 100 of us.
"We found his yellow bucket in the gutter behind the house. And since then... nothing."
Portuguese police have maintained total silence on their investigations since Madeleine went missing in May 2007 from her Algarve holiday apartment in Praia de Luz.
But their Spanish counterparts - a 15-strong team from Madrid - have now confided to Jeremy's mother that they have been liaising with the Portuguese authorities on a theory that child traffickers may have targeted both children - and others.
Portuguese police have often been portrayed as unsympathetic to the McCanns because of the legal technicality whereby they remain "arguidos" by virtue of the fact they cannot be ruled above all suspicion. But this latest revelation proves police on the Algarve still take seriously the possibility that child snatchers took Maddy to sell or pass around paedophile rings.
In her first-ever full interview, Jeremy's mum spoke of the striking similarities between the cases and her belief that both children may still be alive.
She was the first mother in similar circumstances to write movingly to Gerry and Kate McCann.
They in turn included the campaign to find Jeremy - known popularly locally as "Yeremi" - in a symbolic balloon release all over Europe last July.
Ithaisa was a single parent at 16 and Jeremy's biological father was just 14 when he was born.
And she has so far been represented in the Spanish media by her older sister Milagros, 35, and her mother Herminia, 54.
Ithiasa, her left eye inflamed from sleepless tearful nights, refuses to believe her son is dead since he vanished on March 10, 2007.
Now she wants to meet the McCanns and the parents of missing Mari Luz Cortes from Huelva, Spain, to draw international attention to their plight. Ithiasa said at her home in Vecindario, 20 miles south of Las Palmas: "It is not even a year since my son went missing and already I have noticed that people in Spain are not paying so much attention to our battle to find him.
"We have printed 100,000 calendars with his picture and our number on and they have been circulated all over the Canary Islands and Spain - yet interest is still starting to fade.
"The case of Madeleine has been huge internationally but the same thing may start to happen.
"We need to make sure people understand we have not given up on our children being found - and neither should anyone else.
"When we heard about Maddy we started crying here because we knew what they would go through because we were already in the middle of it. That's why we wrote to them.
"They have been going through hell, not only losing their daughter but they have also been accused." Ithaisa has tried to get off the high-dose tranquillisers that kept her on her sofa for months inconsolable, in order to look after Jeremy's younger brother two-year-old Aidan.
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The toddler still kisses the pictures of Jeremy which dot their home like a shrine.
He disappeared from the other side of the kitchen wall, a few metres from aunts and grandparents preparing Saturday lunch.
Ithaisa's eyes cloud with tears as she visits the spot she last saw her son. Candles laid there on Christmas Eve are still untouched.
She said: "Over 2,000 have since helped us search, including the army, the civil protection, looking in 400 wells. We hoped every day he would be found but instead of him reappearing, more children have disappeared.
"They are all the same, no clues, no signs, only alone for a few minutes, no remains found. They are so similar they must have been organised in the same way.
"There have always been monsters harming children but usually the remains are found after some weeks or months. These cases are a new thing like an epidemic - a complete mystery in tiny windows of time with parents nearby.
"So many coincidences, too many for them to be random happenings.
"It's easy to move to Spain and Portugal from here - they could even be the same people behind these disappearances.
"Jeremy may still be here in the town. It only takes a cellar to keep a child hidden and this town has hundreds of cellars. Perhaps they are sold to families without children or to paedophiles. Either way, I believe my son and Maddy are still alive.
"These are not typical attacks on children they are different - and yet similar to each other."
The tears fall again as the young mum holds her son's shoe and cradles the Christmas present he wrote to Santa for and which still waits for him unopened.
She says: "I felt that if I didn't buy him a present it would be like I had given up on him. We have left his bedroom just as it was - waiting for his return.
"Christmas was horrible, we all went to bed at 8pm on Christmas Day to end the tension and sadness in sleep."
But while each day of waiting for news is torture for Ithaisa, she is worried that some people are mentally closing the case on her son. Just weeks ago, Marcos Rodriguez Cabrera, 37, was arrested for trying to kidnap local girl Sandra Dominguez.
For two horrible weeks it appeared Jeremy could have been incinerated at the animal crematorium where Cabrera worked.
But forensic tests have so far ruled that out and police have now told Ithaisa they are 95 per cent sure there is no link to her son's disappearance.
Ithaisa said: "Some people even started taking down the posters of my son around here because they were so sure the case had been solved and that he had met a macabre end at the crematorium.
"But they were trying to bury my son in their minds far too early. I have to believe he is still alive or my world collapses."
Until she gets answers, Ithaisa and her family can do little but wait. she adds: "My father still gets up in the night and sits on the balcony for hours looking down the street to see if Jeremy is being brought back.
"He says he would sell everything and give it all to whoever took him.
"There would be no revenge, we would forgive anything just to have him back, just to see Jeremy again."
My father still gets up in the night and sits for hours to see if he is coming back
It is like an epidemic - there are too many disappearances to be just random
We knew how the McCanns felt because we were already in the middle of it
http://www.mirror.co.uk/life-style/kids-and-family/2008/02/15/jeremy-vargas-mum-tells-how-he-vanished-like-madeleine-mccann-89520-20320499/
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