VIDEO: Locals say 12-year-old girl charged with murder fell through the cracks
RHIANA WHITSON, REPORTER: Chris Tabone runs a barber shop in the inner-city suburb of Footscray.
CHRIS TABONE, FOOTSCRAY BARBER: We have a great community here and that's what I've enjoyed the most out of it. However, we do have a lot of challenges.
RHIANA WHITSON: From his shop he often has a front row seat to the antisocial behaviour and crime taking place on the street.
CHRIS TABONE: Drug use and alcohol abuse that is happening during the day in broad daylight, that turns to something. As the day progresses, they get worse and worse and we're seeing incidents on the regular here.
RHIANA WHITSON: So when a fatal stabbing occurred around the corner from this barber shop in the early hours of last Thursday morning, he wasn’t surprised.
But what was shocking was the age of the alleged offender. A 12-year-old girl was charged with murdering a 37-year-old woman inside a flat in this renovated pub.
We can’t name the girl or the victim for legal reasons, and their relationship remains unclear.
7.30 spoke to a number of people in the area who cold-called police to report the 12-year-old girl's increasingly erratic behaviour in recent weeks.
CHRIS TABONE: I knew exactly who that person was, and I was just really upset because I've seen this young girl in the street over the last six weeks, and we could see that things were getting out of control, and something bad was going to happen.
RHIANA WHITSON: Chris says he spoke to the police a week ago about the girl after he noticed her looking extremely unwell and in need of urgent help.
CHRIS TABONE: I reported extra information in regards to what I've seen over the past four to five weeks with that young girl and that something needed to be done because this was the start of something bigger.
RHIANA WHITSON: Late last year youth worker Samantha Cafaro raised the alarm bells about the girl who has been residential care.
SAMANTHA CAFARO, YOUTH WORKER: What we'd heard in, like so many words, that she was selling herself to older men for money.
When I first heard it, it was hard to believe because you don't think in a world or in 2023, that that would be something that would actually be happening.
RHIANA WHITSON: Samantha says she made seven calls to police and one of her colleagues raised the girl's situation with child services.
SAMANTHA CAFARO: What we got told by them is that they can't do anything. They can't approach her, and they can't stop these men.
What we’d actually said to them was that isn't there anything more that you can do, this is a child? This is a child and again, we just fell on deaf ears.
RHIANA WHITSON: So do you think it could have been prevented?
SAMANTHA CAFARO: Of course it could have been prevented. If had have picked this up a year ago, got this child into services that could have kept her in school, engaged in other programs, she wouldn't be down here.
No child wakes up and says, "This is my life. This is what I want for my future."
LES TWENTYMAN OAM, LES TWENTYMAN FOUNDATION: It's tragic because it was a time bomb everyone knew was going to go off and it did because that girl was reported to me in November last year by Samantha and as I said, we were all watching this kid, and no one was doing anything about it.
RHIANA WHITSON: Samantha’s boss is youth worker, Les Twentyman. He’s worked with young people in Melbourne’s western suburbs for 30 years.
LES TWENTYMAN: What's a 12-year-old doing with a 37-year-old at 2am in the morning when this kid was in state care.
RHIANA WHITSON: Les Twentyman says the state’s police, mental health and child protection services are severely under resourced.
LES TWENTYMAN: Not enough resources and everyone thinks someone else is doing it. If everyone was doing their bit, this crime may not have happened, but they weren't doing their bit, and this is the outcome.
RHIANA WHITSON: Traders in Footscray say they are dealing with an increase in anti-social behaviour and not enough is being done about it.
CALEB BAKER, FOOTSCRAY BAR OPERATOR: That seems to lead to violence, abuse, these sorts of things, and unfortunately, yeah, some of our staff have been on the receiving end of that.
RHIANA WHITSON: Caleb Baker runs the bar across the road from Chris’s barber shop.
The pair have been trying to work with local police to make the area safer.
CALEB BAKER: We had a meeting with the police minister, with the local traders, a lot of the local traders and that local MP.
The overarching view of that, that all the different traders put forward was that one, that people need more help, and there needs to be a more long-term strategy to fix these issues.
And two, we need more help and more support from the police.
CHRIS TABONE: The general feel, since coming out of lockdowns with COVID, is that things have got a lot worse and a little, a little out of hand.
And mostly, I would say that's due to the under resources from the police. We are told to report any incidents and we do, yet they're quite busy going out to many other incidents and sometimes they either come quite late or not at all.
RHIANA WHITSON: The Victorian Minister for Children, Lizzie Blandthorn, who is also a local member for the area, declined the ABC’s request for interview pointing to the ongoing police investigation into the alleged murder.
A Victorian government spokesperson said it was a horrific situation and their hearts go out to the loved ones of those affected.
RHIANA WHITSON: The last time Samantha saw the girl was here about a week before the alleged murder.
SAMANTHA CAFARO: This child has been failed every step of the way, leading up to the most horrific of crimes and the most horrific of circumstances and now two lives are lost.
On Friday a 12-year-old girl was charged with the murder of a 37-year-old woman in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Footscray. The girl was well known to authorities and locals in the area who had been pleading for months to get the girl mental health support.
Rhiana Whitson and Nicole Asher report.