Sister of British man feared ‘murdered’ in Spanish holiday hotspot wants answers
The sister of a British man who died in a Spanish holiday resort town has spoken of her fears he could have been ‘murdered’.
Brett Dryden, 35, was found dead in his Almeria flat with a four-inch gash to his head. Spanish police initially explained the father-of-one’s death as a pulmonary embolism or a blood clot.
Police later told his family that his home in the small town of Mojacar, Andalusia had been robbed and an investigation into what happened is still ongoing.
The father-of-one’s body was discovered on July 22, five years after moving to the resort Costa Almeria to run a legal cannabis club called The Dawg House.
Mr Dryden was found lying on the floor facing upwards next to a living room window by friends who had arranged to meet him.
His sister Shannen Adams told The Independent: “It’s hell on earth. Each day is a struggle.
“His daughter misses him hugely, she talks about her daddy all the time. It’s awful, the worst pain imaginable.”
“I don’t think we will ever be at peace, but knowing whoever did this and for them to be held accountable would bring us a little closure at least.
“There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think of him. He would have moved mountains for any of his family and friends, I know if this were the other way around. He was the life and soul of our family.”
“We won’t ever stop until we get justice for our beautiful Brett,” she continued. “I spoke to Brett two days before his death. He had only just got back to Spain after being home visiting us in the UK.”
His grieving mother, Sandra Adams from Chester-Le-Street in County Durham, had flown over to Spain on her late son’s 36th birthday to speak to locals and police about the night he died.
Neighbours told his family that three men were spotted on CCTV fleeing the scene of the death.
His designer glasses, cash and watch were also missing, prompting fears Mr Dryden could have been killed in a botched robbery.
His mother also claims she received a silent call from her son’s phone hours after medics say he was already dead.
After tracking the mobile, she found it was being turned on and off and pinging from different locations across Spain.
She has flown her son’s body back to the UK to undergo more forensic testing but the results were inconclusive.
In February Ms Adams told The Mirror about what happened when the family first raised their suspicions about her son’s death.
“We rang the police and said, ‘There’s footage of people going into Brett’s house and running away’. I flagged up all these things and that we think it was murder,” she explained.
“After that they called us in and said, ‘We need you and your husband to take a step back and let us deal with it now’.”
The investigation into the death is still ongoing with the Guardia Civil yet to comment on it publicly. The Independent has contacted the force for comment.
A court spokesman previously said: “The investigation hasn’t been suspended or closed. It is still open and this incident remains under investigation.
“The court is waiting for the Civil Guard to complete their full report and present their conclusions. For the time being there’s nothing more we can say.”
To donate to the family fundraiser for legal fees click here.
Scientists say they have discovered a new colour – but there’s a catch
Scientists say they have discovered a new colour only ever seen by five people in the world – called ‘olo’.
The colour, said to be a saturated shade of blue-green, cannot be seen by the naked eye without the help of stimulation by laser, which scientists claim can open people to see beyond the normal gamut of colour perception.
Researchers developed the Oz Vision System technique, named in homage to the green-tinted glasses that people in the Emerald City wear in the ‘Wizard of Oz’, to reveal the new colour in a study, published in the journal Science Advances.
It found when Oz laser signals are intentionally “jittered” by just a few microns (one millionth of a metre) subjects perceive the stimulating laser’s natural colour.
When these same Oz microdoses are delivered accurately, subjects can be made to perceive different colours of the rainbow, unprecedented colours beyond the natural human gamut, and imagery like “brilliant red lines” or “rotating dots on an olo background”.
“We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented colour signal but we didn’t know what the brain would do with it,” said Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley.
“It was jaw-dropping. It’s incredibly saturated.”
Prof Ng, who was one of five people to take part in the experiment, told BBC Radio 4‘s Today programme that olo was “more saturated than any colour that you can see in the real world”.
“Let’s say you go around your whole life and you see only pink, baby pink, a pastel pink,” he said.
“And then one day you go to the office and someone’s wearing a shirt, and it’s the most intense baby pink you’ve ever seen, and they say it’s a new colour and we call it red.”
During the study, the Oz laser only stimulated M cones in the retinas, “which in principle would send a colour signal to the brain that never occurs in natural vision”.
To verify the colour observed during the experiment, each participant adjusted a controllable colour dial until it matched olo.
The colour was given the name ‘olo’ for a reason, as it denotes the binary 010, indicating that among the L, M, and S cones, only the M cones are switched on.
The paper read: “We name this new color ‘olo’. Subjects report that olo in our prototype system appears blue-green of unprecedented saturation, when viewed relative to a neutral grey background.
“Subjects find that they must desaturate olo by adding white light before they can achieve a colour match with the closest monochromatic light, which lies on the boundary of the gamut, unequivocal proof that olo lies beyond the gamut.”
But the findings have been disputed by other experts.
“It is not a new colour,” said John Barbur, a vision scientist at City St George’s, University of London who said the research had “limited value”.
“It’s a more saturated green that can only be produced in a subject with normal red-green chromatic mechanism when the only input comes from M cones.”
Oz could theoretically be used for everyday colour displays, like those in your television or phone screen — but that application seems very unlikely, said co-first author James Fong, a doctoral student in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Our current method depends on highly specialised lasers and optics that are definitely not coming to smartphones or TVs any time soon,” he said.
So until then, only a handful of selected people will be allowed to truly see olo.