Killing of Kumanjayi Little Baby

Kumanjayi Little Baby is the posthumous, culturally respectful name given to a five year old Gurindji Warlpiri girl who was abducted and killed at Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia in April 2026. Her birth name, Sharon Granites, was used by media while she was missing, but after her death her family asked that she be referred to as Kumanjayi Little Baby in line with Aboriginal cultural practice around naming the deceased. She came from a large and prominent Central Australian family that includes contemporary Indigenous artists and the politicians Bess Price and Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who described her as a niece.

She was raised by her parents and extended family alongside an older brother at Ilyperenye Old Timers, a town camp on the southern edge of Alice Springs where the family had moved so she could access medical specialists. The household had been the subject of several child protection notifications linked to alleged domestic violence by her father against her mother, and her father was in prison on related charges at the time of her death. Relatives have said she could not speak and communicated mainly through gestures.

She went missing on the night of 25 April 2026 after last being seen holding hands with Jefferson Lewis, a distant relative and recently released prisoner staying in the same camp. Her disappearance triggered one of the largest search operations in the region's history, involving police, volunteers, vehicles and aircraft. Her body was found by a search party on 30 April 2026, five days after she vanished. Police treated her death as a homicide.

The case mattered because it exposed, in the starkest possible terms, longstanding failures in housing, child protection and justice systems affecting Aboriginal families in Central Australia. Lewis's arrest triggered a violent vigilante attack and then rioting outside Alice Springs Hospital, while the girl's death reignited national debate over the 2007 Little Children are Sacred report and the Northern Territory intervention that followed it. Her family repeatedly appealed for the tragedy not to be turned into a political football, even as politicians across the spectrum invoked her case to argue for policy change.

Lewis was charged on 2 May 2026 with murder and two counts of sexual assault and was remanded to face the Darwin Local Court. An interim review later found that child protection authorities had failed to act in time despite six prior notifications concerning the family, prompting the standing down of department staff and, in July 2026, an overhaul of Northern Territory child protection law. Her funeral was held in Alice Springs on 15 August 2026, with mourners asked to wear pink, her favourite colour, in her memory.