Cape Town - Police and community search efforts for Shasha-Lee November intensified on Wednesday, the fourth day since the 6-year-old vanished from outside her home in Hanover Park.
The navy’s canine unit drove in from Simon’s Town and hundreds more community members spent the day canvassing the region for clues.
While the dogs from the canine unit sniffed their way through a weedy lot along Springfield Street, about half a metre away, metro police completed a search of the family home of Shasha-Lee and her parents, the third such search since investigations began on Monday morning.
As determination to find Shasha-Lee or any sign of her has heightened since then, so has carefully-worded speculation, and in some cases suspicion, about the circumstances surrounding her disappearance.
Shasha-Lee was last seen playing with friends in the dusty lot outside her home on Sunday at about 4pm. When she didn’t return home that night, her parents, Clive and Sandra November, assumed she was sleeping over at a neighbour’s house. When the neighbour didn’t know where she was, Sandra reported Shasha-Lee missing the next morning at around 7am.
At the time of her disappearance, she was wearing white shorts, a white T-shirt and green slippers.
Though metro police and investigators from the Philippi Family Violence Child Protection and Sexual Offences (FCS) Unit have interviewed and re-interviewed kids who were playing with Shasha-Lee when she went missing, family members, friends of the family, and anyone else who might know anything about her vanishing, there have been no leads.
Investigators with the FCS said on Wednesday they were no longer going to search houses in the community, instead devoting efforts to scouring the surrounding area.
“What I find funny is nobody saw this girl, nobody saw what happened, and it happened in broad daylight,” said Rashaan Nazier, vice chair of the Hanover Park Civic Association who was overseeing about 200 volunteers searching down Lansdowne Road from 8am on Wednesday. “Put it this way: something is fishy.”
Nazier said community members were starting to talk about past cases in the area, most recently a 14-year-old girl who vanished two years ago. According to Hanover Park resident Gabeba Jones, the girl’s mother lives blocks away from the Novembers.
Rumours also circulated that “a tip had been sent” to metro police that Shasha-Lee could be found in Lavender Hill, setting off a sandstorm of activity among volunteers who were literally joining hands to scour fields.
SAPS spokesman Frederick van Wyk said the rumour was unsubstantiated.
As Shasha-Lee’s sister, 27-year-old Jasmine Harris, sat outside the November home on Groenal Walk surrounded by forensic units and metro police, she said the family was at a loss for what could have happened to Shasha, whom Harris said never spoke to strangers.
Despite swirling speculation and marathon efforts, everyone involved in the search shared one goal: to find the little girl Harris said was always smiling.
After sending off the second wave of volunteers on Wednesday, Nazier said: “There are a lot of accusations going around. Our job is to find the child.”
* Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Shasha-Lee November is urged to call the JOC at 021 690 1500, Crime Stop 08600 10111 or the investigating officer Constable Keith Wakefield at 083 471 4716.
Cape Argus