Missing toddler Anthony ‘AJ’ Elfalak found alive Putty property four days after he vanished

View
comments

Footage has emerged of the moment a little boy was been miraculously found alive, three days vanished after he vanished his family’s rural property.

Anthony ‘AJ’ Elfalak, three, was last seen playing at his family’s 256ha rural property in Putty, about 150km north-west of Sydney in the Upper Hunter last Friday. 

AJ, who has autism and is non-verbal, was last seen playing on the porch – with his mother saying he was out of her sight for just a matter of seconds.

The 72 hour frantic search ended on Monday when AJ was spotted in a creek 500 metres away from a helicopter around 11.30am on Monday.

NSW Police has shared Pol Air footage of the moment the helicopter found the little boy drinking muddy water from the creek to stay hydrated.

He was whisked away to a waiting ambulance to be assessed and will be taken to Singleton Hospital for a check-up. 

The news sparked emotional scenes at the family property, where  AJ’s parents and friends were seen cheering and screaming in delight moments after being told he had been found.

AJ’s overwhelmed mother Kelly was dragged through dense bushland and collapsed to the ground after emergency services revealed they’d found the toddler three days after he first disappeared.

Footage has emerged of her cradling her precious son moments after being reunited before being rushed to the waiting ambulance.

His dad Anthony held his older two sons close as they were able to see their brother for the first time, surrounded by hundreds of volunteers, emotional loved ones and emergency services in the ambulance.

AJ has since been hailed as Australia’s toughest kid.

‘He has nappy rash, he’s been bitten by ants, he’s fallen over but he’s alive,’ Mr Elfalak told Nine News.

‘He will go to hospital for a full check-up.

‘I don’t know how long he will stay. He will have the night with his mum and maybe tomorrow back here. He was found in a creek drinking water.’ 

AJ is now clinging to his mum after spending 72 hours in the bush alone.

‘He’s my baby, I just can’t believe it. Finding him has saved me from a lifetime of pain,’ his dad told reporters.

‘We have searched that area head to toe. The first day it happened, I went around with police,’ ‘It’s a miracle. He’s alive. It’s amazing.

‘I’ve been in the bush for four days, I haven’t slept.’

Mr Elfalak said it appeared AJ simply wanted to explore the terrain after the family moved into the property full time three months ago.

He said the property has been a ‘sanctuary’ for their family for eight years, but they didn’t consider moving here permanently until recently, when they were desperate to escape Covid in Sydney. 

‘First I’m going to go have my first shower in four days… and then we’re throwing a party,’ Mr Elfalak said, inviting any loved ones from Sydney who wanted to come and celebrate.

Television networks interrupted normal programming for several hours to report live from the scene.

AJ was dehydrated, drenched in water from the creek and ‘a little skinnier than usual’ but otherwise well, overwhelmed loved ones told Daily Mail Australia. 

Family members were overcome with emotion as they thanked everyone involved. 

‘Thank you for everyone. Thank you for the government. Thank you for the police. Thank you very much,’ AJ’s mum Kelly told Nine News.

‘Thank you to my friends, my cousin, my sisters, my family. Thank you, everybody and   whoever prayed for us.’  

Ms Elfalak dropped to the feet of police officers as they assured her that her youngest son was alive and in the care of paramedics.

For the next 15 minutes, loved ones sprinted from every direction, shouting the extraordinary news again and again.

‘He’s alive, he made it,’ they repeated, hugging one another and falling over each other as word spread.

AJ’s distressed mother kept asking how he found his way so far from home, with other relatives claiming he must have been ‘taken there’.

‘We searched this area again and again,’ family friend who has spent the last four days trawling the unforgiving terrain.

‘We never even noticed the creek, and that’s where the found him. He was in the creek.’

AJ’s mother and older brothers only had their eyes off him for seconds when he disappeared from the isolated property.

Older brothers Patrick and Michael  described AJ as ‘the ultimate survivor’.

‘I am going to hug him,’ Patrick told Nine.

‘At first I thought we wouldn’t find him but I knew the helicopters would find him because the helicopters are very high up, they can see anything.’

Michael added ‘He is stronger than me and Patrick. We never walked without someone.

‘AJ is the bravest baby we ever had. We never seen brave baby like that but we know we have.’

The toddler has autism and rarely leaves his mother’s side, so the family were certain it wasn’t a matter of him ‘wandering off’ and said he’d been abducted.

Little AJ’s remarkable tale of survival will be a story for the ages, as his family and friends rushed back to the home to start celebrating.

‘This kid is so strong,’ an elderly man said with tears streaming down his face. ‘Four days in rain, sun, cold. Police just found him in a ditch. After all that.’ 

There were tense scenes on Monday near the family home as information trickled down from police and emergency services to the volunteers that he’d been found.

Many had given up hope of finding him on the property, with experts of survival almost entirely ruling out the possibility that he would be found safe out in the elements.

But relatives never gave up hope.

‘I promised we’d get him home safe, and that’s what we’ve done,’ one said. 

Family friend and AJ’s godfather Alan Hashem described the news as ‘incredible’.

‘But we still need to find out what happened, we need answers,’ he told Seven News.

‘How did he leave? Who did he leave with? Did anything sinister happen?

‘We will not stop until we find the truth.’

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian was ‘absolutely delighted’ by AJ’s discovery, saying it was ‘much-needed good news in otherwise difficult circumstances’.

‘I mean, I think all of us have been crossing everything to make sure AJ is brought back safely,’ she told reporters during Monday’s Covid update.

Prime minister Scott Morrison also expressed his relief.

‘Thank goodness. What a relief. I can’t imagine how traumatic this experience has been for AJ and his parents. Glad to hear he’s safe,’ he said.

NSW State Emergency Services tweeted: ‘We are over the moon and very happy to have provided our assistance.’ 

Several hours earlier, Mr Hashem claimed crucial security camera footage had ‘gone missing’ from the property as the desperate search for AJ entered its fourth day.

He was at the property at the time AJ went missing and claimed someone had tampered with security cameras he had installed on a tree high above the remote bushland road outside the home.

Mr Hashem claimed the time AJ went missing was in the four-hour window of footage that was now missing.

‘There’s one key factor and this probably the first time I actually mentioned this, I installed cameras on that post right there,’ he told the Today show on Monday.

‘There’s footage missing, unexplained. (We have footage from) days before, days after, but not during the time.

‘You know what’s more alarming? We installed it so high you can’t tamper with it and we had two mechanisms of storage – cloud storage and physical storage – and there’s no data in that time slot.

‘We provided the user name and password to the police, we provided them the actual original memory card. There’s a lot of explaining to do.’  

He told Sunrise: ‘I put it so high up in a tree that when the fire brigade arrived I said ‘quickly, quickly, please, let me get the CCTV footage’.

‘We went in there, and I can’t explain it, the window in which he went missing … probably about four hours, there’s footage missing.’

‘There was 160 videos after the incident of emergency services and us taking down the camera. We just don’t have answers at the moment.’ 

Nine reporter Gabrielle Boyle was quick to point out the strange nature of the decision to install CCTV cameras at the isolated property.

‘It must be said it is a very unusual location to have CCTV. This is such a remote location,’ she said.

‘Many of these farmhouses in and around this area are just little shacks, shantytowns if you will. These aren’t big established homes. This isn’t a fancy area.’

‘This is regional NSW. This is very rugged terrain not the type of place you would expect to have CCTV available and to think that that window where the little boy has gone missing is unavailable on that camera is just so strange.’ 

Mr Hashem was at the property helping AJ’s mum prepare lunch on what he described as a typical afternoon when the toddler disappeared.

The boy’s older brothers were in charge of keeping an eye on AJ as they played outside while their father was fixing quad bikes.

‘The oldest boy needed to go to the bathroom and took the youngest one AJ and he left him just inside the dining area,’ Mr Hashem told the Today show.

‘After a few minutes, the boy’s come out and entered through the other part of the house and the mother goes, ‘Where’s AJ?’ 

‘The boys had a puzzled look on their face. We all stand up and at that moment I had the closest view to the driveway and noticed a white ute, we believe either a Mazda or a Toyota, a much older model. It was slowly driving through here.’

‘We didn’t think much of it but we did in the meantime, we had these ATVs, we had about four of them and we thought if AJ’s gone somewhere it’s not going to be far.’ 

He and AJ’s family are ‘without a doubt’ the toddler was abducted and hasn’t get lost in remote bushland which backs onto the property. 

‘He’s always quite afraid and attached to his mum, hence why his mum couldn’t have him by her side when she’s cooking, he is with his brothers. 

‘He’s never wandered.’

AJ’s mother Kelly insisted her son is ‘not a wanderer’ and ‘never leaves her side’, with his father Anthony adding ‘a kid doesn’t just up and disappear’.

Mr Hashem said AJ’s disappearance has shattered his parents, whom he described as the loveliest people he knows.

‘Just bring him home,’ he pleaded.

‘You don’t understand how much pain and anguish this family’s feeling. The reason why I am the spokesperson is because the mother is not coping and the father, he’s holding it together by a thread.’

The family hadn’t given up on finding AJ, with Mr Hashem claiming AJ’s dad Anthony got a tip-off shortly before the Today show interview.

‘He got a bit of a tip-off, heard a noise up in the mountain, heard a noise up in the mountain, he took off,’ he said.

‘We’re still walking through the lake down the bottom there, we’re driving through the community. We’re thinking of doing letter box drops. 

‘He’s hired his own private helicopter. We’re going on it today to keep checking the areas although I do have to say police rescue and SES and volunteers have been absolutely phenomenal. I can’t thank them enough.’

Mr Hashem first shared his claims about the missing footage from the security cameras during the family’s video conference with their religious community via Zoom on Sunday night. 

‘There is something missing in there at the moment but police are investigating,’ he explained.

‘It was very high up. No one could get access to it.’

‘I got the detectives to take it down, take out the memory card and gave it to police.’ 

A white ute from a nearby property was seized by police on Sunday night as they searched an abandoned shack about 1km south of the Elfalak house, labelling the car a ‘vehicle of interest’. 

Pictures from the abandoned property show a dingy shack fitted out with old furniture, with the floors strewn with rubbish. 

Police cordoned off the area and are trying to ascertain if anyone had been staying there, with 9News reporting it had been declared a crime scene.

They have also seized a number of items from the property, amid reports someone had been sleeping rough there. 

Police also seized CCTV footage from a Colo Heights service station, a 40 minute drive south from Putty in the direction of Sydney, declaring it a ‘site of interest’.

‘I’m his universe. He holds my hand, all day and all night we are together,’ the boy’s mother told The Australian. 

She and the boy’s father joined the large search party, including police divers, the riot squad, trail bikes, drones and mounted officers, who were searching for the toddler over the weekend. 

Police has launched Strikeforce Jaylang to investigate the circumstances of AJ’s disappearance. 

‘He’s been taken. If he was around here, I would have found him by now,’ Ms Elfalak said.

‘I have searched the property… I’m still driving around and I cannot find him. If he was here, he’d be close to the property.’

Despite a search party being set up 10 minutes after AJ went missing, with four vehicles soon covering a large radius around the farm, he was nowhere to be found. 

Ms Elfalak also said she noticed the suspicious white ute driving away from her house in the minutes after AJ vanished. 

‘I saw it, it was driving really slowly, I thought it was my neighbour’s,’ Ms Elfalak told The Daily Telegraph.

‘He’s not a wanderer… he never leaves my side.’

She was in the kitchen as AJ played on the porch, while his father was nearby in the yard fixing the chain on his quad bike. 

AJ was dressed in a grey top and pants with sneakers and is described as being of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance, with short brown hair.

Officers on Sunday were seen talking to one of AJ’s older brothers – he has three brothers Michael, Patrick and Alexander – in a paddock near the house, with one of the young boys taking detectives on a re-enactment of his brother’s disappearance. 

A neighbour recalled hearing AJ’s mother raise the alarm and then stood up and spotted the vehicle – a white 1987 dual cab Toyota Hilux ute – driving down the road to the property. 

He said the ute drove along Yengo Drive, 100m from the family’s house, before going out to Putty Road – something he found unusual.  

‘We didn’t see it enter. We see every car that enters because it’s a dead end… Something’s not right. Something doesn’t stack up,’ he added.

Despite the desperation of the four-day-long hunt, officials have asked locals not to join the search as it would breach Covid restrictions.

NSW Police said public assistance is not required in the search for the young boy and reminded people that Covid Public Health Order restrictions still apply in the region. 

‘Police are absolutely looking into every angle possible in relation to AJ’s disappearance,’ Superintendent Tracy Chapman said.   

‘Obviously our focus is very much around the search and trying to locate AJ.’ 

Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers.