JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Family photos now mean much more to Lydia Simons. They capture happy times with her younger brother Dimitri Vazquez.
“You can see in this that Dimitri is holding Luna and putting little bunny ears up behind her,” said Vazquez, showing a picture of her brother.
Early Thursday morning, the family says Vazquez’s mother received a text from her 17-year-old son while she was in the hospital. She feared he would take his own life.
According to the police report, she returned home and found her gun was missing from her safe and her son was gone.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office says it sent an alert with a photo of Vazquez to patrol officers and requested surveillance from the area near his home where he was last seen.
“The moment he went missing I was posting. I was posting on instagram and Facebook and then I think it might have been two or three days of us looking and I was like, I will try to make a Tik Tok and see if we’ll get any views, and that’s when it blew up immediately," said Simons.
Simons says the family started to get tips from the community about his whereabouts.
A police report says the mother asked twice for K-9's to be used in the search and was told that couldn’t be done.
On Tuesday, the family says a detective told them Vazquez’s body had been found in the river and it was so decomposed they had to use dental records.
Simons says her family is still waiting for an explanation from police as to why a missing person’s alert was not issued.
“We called the police station to call in tips and they acted like we didn’t know what we were talking about or that we needed to wait for the detective to get back to work. It’s a missing child with a gun. I feel like that’s something that should be more serious that people should’ve known," said Simons.
First Coast News reached out to JSO yesterday and today regarding this case and the investigation. We have not heard back.
We also reached out to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, who says without an investigation agency requesting it, they can't put out an Amber Alert or child alert.
