Agony of missing man’s family as search efforts prove fruitless

ALMOST two months after he disappeared, the family of Derek Browne are still going through a “living hell”.

There have been hundreds of reported sightings of the 28-year-old machine operator from Mullingar, Co Westmeath, but none have yielded anything, nor have searches of canals, fields and woods.

“I couldn’t describe how bad it is and how low you feel,” said his father, Dermot Browne.

“My hope is that we find him safe and well, but my worst nightmare is that I will never see him again.”

He is continuing to search on his own after work every day. He has also traded in the family car to replace it with a jeep, which is more suitable for travelling over rough ground.

“We’ve been almost eight weeks searching now and we’ve searched high and low. We gone through forests, we’ve crawled through ditches, we’ve had the Garda sub-aqua unit swim the Royal Canal. Everything, and still nothing comes up,” Mr Browne said.

Derek Browne left his family home at 7.30am on Friday, June 6, to travel to work in a factory four miles away. He borrowed 3 from his mother, Ann, for cigarettes, and asked her to buy a birthday card and a video for his ex-girlfriend, whom he had broken up with two weeks earlier. That was the last the family saw of him.

“We thought he was getting over the split, but he got a beating in town at the weekend and he was bit depressed after that. But we didn’t know he was so depressed that he was either going to go away or do something to himself,” Mr Browne said.

Since Derek’s disappearance, the family have set up a freephone number at the house, distributed posters around the country and sent chain e-mails with Derek’s details. Gardaí in Westmeath have received hundreds of phone calls from all around the country, and say the investigation is still ongoing.

The latest edition of the Big Issue magazine in Britain is including details of Derek’s disappearance, and his photo will be printed on British milk cartons.

“Every time the phone rings, you’re hoping it’s somebody ringing about him. If you get a phone call and nobody speaks, you say ‘maybe it’s Derek and he wants to hear our voices.’ We got a caller ID, but the calls are coming from all over the country, so it can’t be him,” said Mr Browne.

“But you live in hope. If you don’t have hope, you’ve nothing.”

Anyone with information on Derek Browne can contact the Gardaí at 044 48915 or 044 84000, or the freephone number 1800 929 010.