“I’ve been lying to try and protect my mum and grandad,” says Alex Batty, now 17, as he breaks his silence about his disappearance and what really happened when he ran away from the commune where he allegedly lived with his mother and grandfather.
A 17-year-old teen from England who was just found after disappearing in Spain in 2017 is opening up about running away from the commune he’s allegedly been living at with his mom and grandfather.
Alex Batty, now a teenager, went missing while on vacation with his mother and grandfather six years ago. Batty was just 11 when he disappeared and subsequently reported missing … before he was found in the French town of Revel, east of Toulouse, France last week.
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The boy claimed he had been walking for days when a delivery driver picked him up on the side of the road. “He said he’d been living in a kind of itinerant commune. He wasn’t under any compulsion but he said he found his mother a bit weird and decided he didn’t want this kind of life, and that he wanted to set his own path — that’s why he decided to leave,” Remi Buhagiar of La Depeche newspaper reported.
Now, Batty himself is speaking out in an interview with The Sun, providing the outlet with photos of what he looks like now and revealing he’s been “lying” about his escape. According to the teenager, he wasn’t walking around lost for four days and four nights, as he initially claimed, and instead always knew where he was and was trying to throw off authorities.
“I’ve been lying to try and protect my mum and grandad but I realize that they’re probably gonna get caught anyway. I pretended I had been on such a long journey for that reason,” he said. “My plan was to get to Toulouse so that I could get as far away as possible. But I was so knackered when the delivery driver picked me up I just blurted out a story.”
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He said that once he made contact with his grandmother and was brought to a local police station, he was “in f–king bits on the floor because I’m thinking, ‘S–t, I shouldn’t have said anything.'”
Batty told The Sun he made a run for it after a big fight with his mother and deciding he was done with her “pain in the ass” lifestyle. “We had a stupid argument about nothing,” he told the outlet. “My mum can argue about anything so it doesn’t take much. She is very set in her views. I just had enough and thought, ‘That’s it, I’m leaving.'”
Those views, he said, included being anti-vax and anti-government, with Batty saying he left behind a note for his mom as he took off.
“Hey mum I want you to know I love you very much,” he said it read. “I am very thankful for the life that you provided me for over the past few years. Don’t worry about yourselves, I am sure you won’t get found. Don’t worry about me either. You know I can take care of myself. I love you very much. Don’t be too mad with me.”
He went on to tell the outlet that while his mother is a “good person,” she’s “not a great mom,” adding that he left, in part, because he wanted “to have a decent home” and “a future, because it’s no way to live.”
Batty is currently living with his grandmother and hopes to go to college. He believes his mom and grandfather, meanwhile, will make a run for Finland.
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