The family of a missing 12-year-old girl appeal for her to come home, as police continue to make door-to-door enquiries in the New Addington area of south London. Saima Mohsin reports from Croydon.
Tia Sharp has been missing for four days since around midday on Friday. She was visiting her grandmother in New Addington when she disappeared after telling her family she was going shopping in Croydon’s Whitgift Centre. It is understood that she was taking the bus into town.
Her family made their first public appeal on Monday night – her uncle David Sharp spoke at a press conference at New Scotland Yard saying: “Tia, please come home. You’re not in any trouble”.
He appealed for any witnesses to get in touch with the police and for Tia to simply call home. There have been at least 55 unconfirmed sightings of her over the weekend. As time goes on, concern for her safety increases.
The community in both New Addington, where she was last seen and in Mitcham – and where she lives with her mother, step-father and two siblings – has been rallying round, putting up posters and handing out fliers trying to raise awareness of her disappearance.
Police search teams spent most of Monday checking garages, bins, gardens and doing fingertip searches of the area around her grandmother’s home within a 250m radius.
There was a smaller police presence in the area on Tuesday, but plain-clothes officers are now making detailed door-to-door enquiries.
The family have put candles along the pathway and at the bus stop, which they say will light the way home for Tia. They hope Tia will not be spending a fifth night away from home, away from her family.
Described to me by friends and neighbours as a “bubbly, sociable, good girl”, Tia has never run away from home, which is why her disappearance seems out of character.
Tia has been described as a streetwise 12-year-old who often went out alone to nearby areas of Mitcham, Wimbledon and Croydon.
However, the day she went missing Tia left her mobile phone on charge at her grandmother’s house, and having lost her travel pass it is difficult to track the route she took.
Police are therefore asking bus and tram drivers to recall if they saw Tia on the day she went missing or over the weekend. Detectives are trawling through hours of CCTV footage from public transport and local shops.
They have released a picture of Tia grabbed from CCTV footage of her the night before she went missing, taken in a local supermarket.
At the time she disappeared she was wearing a yellow vest top and grey skinny jeans but with pink and black high-top trainers.
She is described as 4’5″ tall and slim, and she wears glasses.