A terrified mum fears she will never see her teenage son again after he disappeared while on holiday with his dad.
Rebecca Jones, 35, said her eldest son Jayden, 13, was supposed to return with father Andrew Pearson, 33, following a 10-day trip to the Algarve in Portugal year.
But she was left confused and worried when the pair failed to show up on their late-night flight back to East Midlands Airport on September 14.
The penny dropped, she said, when she attempted to get in contact with Andrew and discovered he had blocked her number on his phone.
Recalling her horror, she said: “At first, I kept trying to call him, kept trying to text him. I thought something had happened. I thought he might have had an accident.
"And then he blocked me, and blocked all my family.”
“It was just a holiday. When he didn’t return I was numb, I was worried, I was scared and I was heartbroken.”
After the initial shock, Rebecca said she had kept trying to reach Andrew, and when that failed reported him and her son as missing to UK police on around September 22 last year.
Not long after his disappearance, the distressed mum began to create posters and share them on social media in the hope that someone would see Jayden’s face and identify his whereabouts.
But after Andrew was sighted and photographed at a farm resort in the Nazaré region of Portugal, which is 250 miles from Lagos, she started to receive threatening messages from him about her heartfelt pleas.
And he even suggested that he was now planning to take Jayden to Bulgaria.
They read: “Well done. Thanks… You’ve successfully f***d us both. Clap clap. Hopefully no f****g bears eat us!
“If we successfully make it to Bulgaria I will make contact then. Good night sleep well!”
Rebecca says she had retained custody of both Jayden and his brother, Mathew, 11, since 2019 after her relationship broke down with Andrew.
She now suspects that Andrew had planned all along to use the trip to take her son away from her and split up their children.
Reflecting on how the holiday came about, she said: “It was a holiday for him – it was meant to be a ten-day holiday. He organised it. At the time, I didn’t suspect anything. But now I feel like he planned it all along.
“He has not got any family with him, or anyone out there. And if anything happened to him, what happens to Jayden?”
Jayden's 14th birthday will be on May 11.
A South Yorkshire Police spokesperson said: “We can confirm we have received a report and we are treating Andrew and Jayden as missing persons.”
