HOPEWELL, Hanover – The excruciating pain being experienced by the family of missing Hanover man, 20-year-old Jamar Mason, is all too familiar as this is their second loved one who has gone missing without a trace in just over a decade.

Mason, a customer service agent at a call centre in St James, has been missing since last week Wednesday. His last known whereabouts is Whitehouse, St James.

His aunt Marcelin Scarlett told the Jamaica Observer West that her family is devastated after realising that he did not return to their Hopewell home after he left for work.

“The pain is just excruciating because we have another sister who has been missing for 11 years and we do not know where she is. This feels like it opened fresh wounds that we haven’t healed from regarding that situation,” said Scarlett.

She noted that her sister Alma Gilling went missing in 2011. She was last seen in Falmouth, Trelawny.

While seemingly overwhelmed with emotions, Scarlett told the Observer West that she is begging for some closure on behalf of Mason’s parents.

“Mi a try nuh fi cry because I don’t want to get emotional. I want him to come home healthy, but if somebody do him anything, we would want to know where he is. If a even one strand of his hair, mek we find it so we have closure because 11 years now we nuh have no closure. We cya manage this. If dem do him something just mek we find him, so we can put him to rest because this just too much,” she pleaded.

Mackalia Mason, the missing man’s older sister, explained that she was alerted by her sister that he did not return home on Wednesday night. This, she said, was an abnormality of his schedule.

She had last seen him in the morning before he headed out for work.

“I live downstairs and he lives upstairs, so in the mornings he would call to me and say, ‘later, Kalie, see you soon’ before going off to work,”Mackalia said.

“Normally when he comes home in the evenings around eight [pm], he would go into his room and change before he comes downstairs to let me know that he is here or he would just shoot me a text message. Thursday morning my sister came to me and said Jamar didn’t sleep here last night. I found that strange because if he was going to sleep out he would have let me know and he doesn’t really sleep out.”

Though attempts to reach Mason on Thursday morning proved futile, Mackalia told the Observer West she was not worried until she received a call from a close family member. The family became ‘suspicious’ after learning that Mason went to meet with a friend after work.

“I sent him [Mason] a text message on WhatsApp and I realised that I only got one tick, but it was about 7:30 am, so I went on about my day until a family member reached out to ask if I had heard from Jamar or seen him come home. That was strange because normally she would be the one to know where he is because he and that cousin are very close,” Mackalia explained.

“I tried to reach him again after I heard from that cousin, on his second phone, but I only got one tick again. I called both of his phones and they went straight to voicemail. I started worrying, so I reached out to someone that knows a worker at the same call centre to see if he was at work. I was also trying to track his phone because he has an iPhone and we share locations, but I realised that his location is not coming up,” she added.

“She [the cousin] told me that when Jamar left work [last week] Wednesday, he went to meet a friend in Whitehouse, Montego Bay. She said she was on the phone with him while he was waiting on the friend and she told him to let her know when he gets home. He said ‘okay.’ She said she asked him what time he thinks he will get home and he said ‘about 10:00 pm’.”

With her younger brother missing for over a week, Mackalia is worried as to his whereabouts.

“I am confused and I am not coping well because we have lived together since we were children. He is like my best friend who I tell everything. With him not being here right now is very hard for me,” she told the Observer West.

Mason was reported missing to lawmen at the Sandy Bay Police Station and the Coral Gardens Police Station.

The Jamaica Constabulary Force’s Corporate Communications Unit (CCU) have confirmed that Mason was reported missing by his family.

Subsequent to that report, a missing person alert was sent out by the police on September 9.

A police source told the Observer West that investigators are yet to find any clues that will shed light on Mason’s disappearance.