{"id":749,"date":"2026-04-28T22:11:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T22:11:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/749\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T22:11:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T22:11:18","slug":"what-we-know-about-the-night-5yo-girl-sharon-granites-went-missing-in-alice-springs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/749\/","title":{"rendered":"What we know about the night 5yo girl Sharon Granites went missing in Alice Springs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late on Saturday night, a five-year-old girl vanished from a home in an Alice Springs town camp, sparking a desperate search.<\/p>\n

In the days since, as Sharon Granites’s disappearance has made national headlines and the search for her has expanded, a clearer picture of what happened that night has emerged.<\/p>\n

Here’s what we know so far.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The house where Sharon Granites was last seen in Old Timers town camp, in Alice Springs. (ABC News: Will Green)<\/p>\n

Saturday was a warm autumn day in Alice Springs, when Sharon and her mother visited a home at the Old Timers \/ Ilyperenye Aboriginal camp on the outskirts of the regional town.<\/p>\n

The town camp is a small community, with only nine households and about 40 residents, which is maintained by the local Aboriginal corporation Tangentyere Council.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Old Timers town camp is a small community situated between the Alice Springs town centre and the suburb of Kilgariff. (ABC News Graphics: Jessica Henderson)<\/p>\n

Police say Sharon and her mother were visiting the home of some people they knew well, to do some Saturday laundry.<\/p>\n

As the evening went on, police say a party was held at the house for a “social occasion”, with several people in attendance.<\/p>\n

One of those people was Jefferson Lewis, a 47-year-old man who was staying at the home at Old Timers after having been released from prison six days prior<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Police are searching for Jefferson Lewis in relation to the alleged abduction. (Supplied: NT Police Force)<\/p>\n

At some point that night, police say they visited the town camp for an unrelated incident and captured footage of Mr Lewis on officers’ body-worn cameras.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The grainy photos from that night’s footage show Mr Lewis wearing a bright yellow shirt and a grey and yellow cap.<\/p>\n

Police say their interaction with Mr Lewis that night was “fortuitous” and that “no offence” had occurred at that time, with police leaving the location shortly after.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Jefferson Lewis was at Old Timers town camp the night Sharon went missing. (Supplied: NT Police Force)<\/p>\n

But at 11pm that night, police say Mr Lewis was seen by those in the area for the last time, and he was with a little girl believed to be Sharon.<\/p>\n

“He was last seen with the little girl holding hands,” police said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Just before 11:30pm, Sharon was put into bed by family at the house that she and her mother were visiting. She was wearing a dark blue short-sleeved T-shirt with a white ring stripe around the neck and cuffs and a pair of black boxer-style underwear.<\/p>\n

That was the last time anyone saw her.<\/p>\n

\"young<\/p>\n

Sharon Granites was last seen on Saturday night, by family members. (Supplied: NT Police Force\u00a0)<\/p>\n

A little later, Sharon’s mother went to check on her little girl in the bedroom she was sleeping in and found that she had vanished.<\/p>\n

At 1:30am, the distraught mother called NT Police and reported Sharon missing.<\/p>\n

Police now believe that Mr Lewis “led that little girl away” from the home<\/a>.<\/p>\n

From a young girl who ‘wandered off’ to a suspected abduction<\/p>\n

After arriving at Old Timers town camp in the early hours of Sunday morning, police spent hours conducting a search of the area.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Police initially told the media they believed Sharon might have “wandered off” through an unlocked door<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Throughout the rest of the day, a search party of more than 50 police officers, as well as members of the NT Emergency Service, looked for the five-year-old in the surrounding area, including along the dry Todd River, which is adjacent to the town camp.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

NT Emergency Service members searching the dry riverbed of the Todd for any sign of Sharon Granites. (ABC News: Will Green\u00a0)<\/p>\n

With no luck overnight, on Monday morning, police recommenced a foot and air search of the area, with the help of the force’s elite Territory Response Group (TRG).<\/p>\n

History of man police are searching for over 5yo missing girl<\/a><\/p>\n

A man being sought in connection with the alleged abduction of five-year-old Sharon Granites near Alice Springs has a long history of violence and prison time in the Northern Territory.<\/p>\n

By 9:30am on Monday, police announced to the media they believed Sharon had been abducted<\/a> and were searching for Mr Lewis in relation to her disappearance.<\/p>\n

Later that day, Mr Lewis’s long history of violence and repeated stints in NT prisons<\/a> over the last decade was reported in the media.<\/p>\n

Among his past offences were serious assaults, contraventions of domestic violence orders, breaches of bail and acts of resisting police.<\/p>\n

The search continued on Tuesday, including through dense scrubland. Speaking at a press conference that morning, police said despite two days of search efforts yielding no results, they believed the five-year-old girl was still alive.<\/p>\n

\"<\/p>\n

Peter Malley says police believe Sharon Granites is still alive. (ABC News: Will Green)<\/p>\n

NT Police Assistant Commissioner for Crime and Intelligence Peter Malley said the girl’s suspected abduction had been declared a major crime and finding her was the force’s “number one priority”.<\/p>\n

Assistant Commissioner Malley added that the case was “one of the biggest investigations [the NT’s] had going for a while”, with the “TRG, motorbikes, horses, helicopters, drones” all having been deployed for the search effort, as well as Aboriginal trackers.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Horses, dogs and helicopters have all been used in the search for the missing girl. (ABC News: Will Green)<\/p>\n

The assistant commissioner said a fugitive task force had also been called to Alice Springs to assist on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The NT Police Force’s executive director of cultural reform, Leanne Liddle, said the mother of the five-year-old girl was “distraught” and was going through “every parent’s worst nightmare”.<\/p>\n

Police are continuing to call on anyone with information about Sharon or Mr Lewis to contact them, no matter “how small in detail you think it may be”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Late on Saturday night, a five-year-old girl vanished from a home in an Alice Springs town camp, sparking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1517,1521,1518,1523,1522,22,21,1515,1519,1524,1516,1520,1514],"class_list":["post-749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-5-year-old-missing","tag-abducted-girl","tag-alice-springs","tag-alice-springs-abduction","tag-alice-springs-missing-girl","tag-au","tag-austrlia","tag-jefferson-lewis","tag-jefferson-lewis-crimes","tag-missing-5-year-old","tag-missing-girl","tag-sharon","tag-sharon-granites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}