Footprints, fake AI images and few clues: Mystery over four year-old boy who vanished in the Australian Outback
Four-year-old Gus Lamont’s grandmother watched him playing freely in a small sandpit near his South Australia two Saturdays ago.
Half an hour later, when she called him in for dinner, the blonde, wavey-haired boy had vanished.
Police have now scaled back the huge search operation for August, one of the largest the area has seen in recent years with hundreds of police officers, soldiers, sniffer dogs, drones and helicopters drafted in.
Two weeks later, August, also known as Gus, is still missing, and police have said it is unlikely he has survived.
The search for answers over August’s disappearance from his family’s sheep station 40km south of Yunta, nearly 300km north of Adelaide, continues. The Independent takes a look at everything we know about his disappearance.
Gus was last seen playing in the sand around 5pm on Saturday 27 September. He was wearing a grey sun hat, a cobalt blue t-shirt featuring a yellow ‘Minion’ character, light grey long pants, and boots, police said.
Police cadets, State Emergency Service volunteers, an Aboriginal tracker and a community of family members have joined the search in the days since the disappearance.
Three days later, authorities found a shoe print around 500 metres from the property, which they said had a “very similar” pattern to the shoes Gus was wearing when he went missing.
But police also noted it could have been there for a week before it was found, and without any further footprints to go off, the trail went dead.
Superintendent Mark Syrus said police were “hoping that Gus has crawled into a hole somewhere and he’s just still hanging in there”.
But the search was scaled back shortly afterwards on Friday 3 October.
“Whilst we have all been hoping for a miracle, that miracle has not eventuated, and in the last 48 hours, despite the professional advice, it being unlikely that Gus would have survived, we have maintained and in fact increased the effort to try and locate him and bring him to his family,” he said.
A host of theories have been proposed and then rejected.
Police have investigated the possibility that he simply wandered off, and became struck or trapped in the rugged terrain near his home.
