Rubber bullets flew and a police van burned, then a furious man pounded on my car

Warning: This story contains the name and images of a deceased Indigenous person.

Alice Springs: We got the word Jefferson Lewis had been arrested just as I’d finally put my head down to sleep.

It had been a huge day. We started it with Kumanjayi Little Baby’s family, sitting with them in their home in Old Timers Camp. They were still immensely sad, but were hopeful on what would have been the fifth day of the Northern Territory police and state emergency services search for the missing five-year-old.

The young girl had disappeared on Anzac Day, and was last seen in the company of Jefferson Lewis- a 47-year-old man who had recently got out of prison.

Police immediately zeroed in on Lewis as a potential kidnapper, but it was only on Thursday afternoon that we got the news everyone had dreaded: her body had been found.

We went to the crime scene, and among the buffalo grass contemplated how a tiny girl would have felt out here in the company of a near stranger.

When we got back to our hotel, ready to finally turn in for the evening, shouts started up on the Alice Springs streets below.

“They got him! He’s at the hospital!”

A woman ran over from another balcony to show me a livestream of people gathering outside the Alice Springs Hospital, surrounding the front car park of the building.

Photographer Sam Mooy and I ran to our car and headed down there ourselves – and what we saw was described by one bystander as the “biggest thing” they’d ever seen in Alice Springs.

Hundreds of people crowded the street, throwing things at police, screaming hatred for the man who had been locked away inside.

Lewis had been taken straight to the hospital because he had been found by police beaten at a nearby Charles Creek residence.

Some in the crowd wanted blood, and demanded it.

Police responded by first holding the line and blocking all access to the hospital, but the shouts got louder, and bricks began to be hurled.

Officers ducked behind their cars, which had their window shields smashed and repeatedly kicked by what looked like young children.

Men screamed for Lewis to be brought out – “so we can all go home”. Those in the crowd said they wanted to deal with him their way. They were furious with police for “protecting him”, and a kind Aboriginal liaison officer in his 70s who had been looking after the family and had consoled me earlier outside their residence took the brunt of their anger.

Soon, police began to respond. A woman used me as a human shield to avoid a rubber bullet being shot at us, and bodies collapsed around us as tear gas spread.

I piggybacked a seven-year-old boy across the road and back to his mother as tears streamed down his face, crying out the pepper spray. I was soon to follow, coughing and spluttering with my hands on my knees as a kind man offered me some water in his car.

About midnight and after two hours of rioting, we called it and jumped into the car for safety, but then an irate man pounded on our hood and told us to leave. We didn’t understand his urgency until we saw a police car behind us go up in flames.

It was hard to tell if the series of booms that followed was from the rubber bullets being fired, glass shattering or the interior of the police car burning.

I could only watch on as another cameraman took a face full of spray, and had his eyes washed out by a journalist from another outlet. A bin was set on fire. Rocks were thrown at police. Men pulled shirts over their faces and children had water poured over their eyes.

But still, Lewis remained inside. For all the screaming, throwing, crying – police have every intention of bringing the man they say murdered Kumanjayi Little Baby to justice.

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