SAN JOSE, Calif. — Newly obtained documents in the killing of Sophia Mason show that Hayward police — after getting a missing person’s report about the 8-year-old in March 2022 — swiftly determined what Alameda County social workers had failed to see for more than a year: The girl was in danger and needed immediate help.
But by the time officers found Sophia just three days later, it was too late. She was already dead, decomposing in the bathtub of a house where her mother and the mother’s boyfriend had lived in Merced.
The documents, compiled by police and obtained after this news organization successfully sought a court order, confirm the findings of ongoing reporting by the Bay Area News Group detailing how Alameda County’s Department of Children and Family Services failed to protect Sophia in the year before she died. County social workers repeatedly ignored evidence of the danger Sophia was in under her mother’s care — and did not meet their legal obligations to elevate allegations of abuse to law enforcement.
