Taylor Casey Update: Mother travels to Bahamas after daughter disappears, says visit was ‘very disturbing’

Bahamas — The family of a Chicago woman who went missing in the Bahamas is now asking the US government for more help.

Taylor Casey, 41, was last seen on June 19 while attending a yoga retreat on the island paradise.

“A young woman called and said, ‘Have you heard from Taylor?’ I knew it, so I looked at the phone. She was from a yoga retreat and said Taylor had missed her yoga class,” Casey’s mother, Collette Seymour, recalled.

Seymour visited the retreat last week and described her visit as “deeply unsettling.”

She said she had to beg to speak to students at the camp and that they felt like they were “instructed on what to say and what not to say.”

Seymour also said she had not seen any missing person posters, despite authorities saying they had spoken to “a lot of people” and deployed drones, divers and dog units.

“Without the support of the US government I feel police could only do the bare minimum and we may never know what happened to Taylor,” Seymour said.

Police found Casey’s cell phone in the water last week, but her family says authorities are refusing to hand it over to them.

“We love Taylor and she needs to be returned to her family,” Seymour said.

Family members say Casey would never “slip away” without a word.

Police asked yoga retreat attendees for statements about Taylor but did not say whether they had been questioned.

Police reportedly refused to tell the family team how many statements they had collected or the names of those who had taken part in those statements.

Ram Soskin, lead manager of the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat, said that on the Monday before Casey disappeared, an unidentified man was seen carrying a walkie-talkie walking across the same platform where Taylor’s tent was located.

One of the retreat attendees spoken to by the Taylor Casey search team said that on the day Casey was last seen, he was sitting alone on the beach when a stranger approached him.

The man, dressed in all black and wearing a Celtics cap, claimed to be from Chicago and was interested in yoga classes, and followed Taylor Casey onto the property, according to a website set up to search for her.