Images of missing teen ‘do not reflect personality’
Debbie Rose, whose daughter Ashley is best friends with Amy, said the pictures used in Spain and Ireland did not represent her quiet and shy nature.
“The pictures that you see aren’t actually the best pictures that could be given because obviously you can imagine when teenage girls get together they start posing,” she told the Breakfast Show on Newstalk radio.
“She was a very quiet girl, very shy, until you actually got to know her. She wasn’t flirty in any way, shape or form. She was a lovely girl. She was very into herself, as you say, introverted. And as my Ashley says, a lot of people judged her by the way she looked but actually until you got to know her, you couldn’t possibly say what type of girl she was. And she was a very, very quiet girl.”
Debbie, a close friend of Amy’s mother, Audrey, lives near the family in Calahonda between Marbella and Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol, said she last saw the teenager about 10pm on New Year’s Day.
Amy stayed on New Year’s Eve to help Ashley mind her younger brother. She stayed all the next day. “They [Ashley and Amy] spent the whole day together. They went out for a few hours, came back, had something to eat, went out again for just over an hour and came back home about quarter to 10. They chatted for a while and then Amy went upstairs and got her things. And she just said goodbye, just said she was going home.”
Debbie said Ashley was deeply upset by her disappearance. “What can I say — she really fears the worst. We’re just hoping that if anyone has got Amy, that they are watching the news — it’s featured quite a lot here in the Spanish news — that they might get frightened and let her go. We are just praying and hoping that, that is going to be the case.”
She was adamant Amy had not run away despite being unhappy in Spain and often talking about wanting her family to return to Ireland where her father lives.
“She hasn’t run away because she didn’t have a phone or any money. Because she stayed over the previous night, she had her clothes that she had on her that day, on the 31st, in her carrier bag and she had on a pair of Ashley’s trousers and her boots.
“She didn’t have any money or a telephone. And she would have mentioned it to Ashley. She wasn’t happy in Spain. She really wanted to go back to Ireland. She had said that on various occasions to my daughter.”
