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.
The huge search effort after August’s 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.
What are the theories behind his disappearance?
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.
Searchers have also looked for signs of an animal attack or an environmental danger, but no physical evidence, such as blood, remains, or animal tracks, have been seen.
A criminologist, Xanthe Mallett, told Australian news site News.com.au that the signs of the case suggest a third party may have been involved.
“Given he’s so young, it’s very unlikely that he would have run away. That’s more a teenager kind of thing,” she said.
“The scale of the search and how detailed it was, and the drones and everything else, it does feel at this stage, sadly, that if they haven’t found something that it’s likely to be third-party involvement.”
But police have not named anyone from the family or community as suspects behind his disappearance.
Reports have emerged in recent days of AI images being spread online concerning August’s disappearance, including one circulating on Facebook which showed a boy with long blonde hair being held by a man getting into a car.
A number of other fake images of Gus were also spread online, including several claiming to show breakthroughs in the case, ABC reported.
A nation left in shock
The story of August’s disappearance has gripped the nation, owing to the uncertainty and sheer shortage of clues for authorities to base their investigations on.
There has been an outpouring of public support and symbolic gestures from locals, particularly after the search was scaled back.
South Australians were asked to leave a light on in their homes overnight as the search wound down, a show of support for young August and his family.
Volunteers in the local community were heavily involved in the search effort, including former State Emergency Service personnel and others who know the land well.
But unfounded online theories that the family were involved in the disappearance, prompting outcry.
Fleur Tiver, a longtime family friend of the family, described the speculation as “heartbreaking”. She said: “There is no way they’ve harmed this child. The family would not have harmed this child even if the world was about to come to an end, which it really has now for them.”
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