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Inside the bathroom of the modest two-story home in north Merced, a tiny, 55-pound body lay decomposing in a tub. The roaring exhaust fan and burned incense failed to mask the putrid smell.
In the backyard, soiled sheets, candy wrappers, and other food packaging littered a locked metal shed – used for punishment, police were later told. The outline of a small handprint blemished a dusty brown nightstand inside.
This is how police found Sophia Mason, an eight-year-old Hayward girl who had lived through so much cruelty in the months before her death but never received the protection she needed from Alameda County’s Department of Children and Family Services. Now, a three-month investigation by the Bay Area News Group is raising critical concerns about the county agency that left Sophia under the care of a mother who had a history of mental illness and neglecting her, until she died.
“It was probably the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in my career,” said Merced police Sgt. Kalvin Haygood of the scene he encountered March 11. “I just can’t begin to imagine what that child went through.
“It really makes you wonder, ‘Where did it all go wrong? Why wasn’t this child protected?’”
That question is far more difficult to answer than it should be. Alameda County is refusing to disclose details of how it handled at least eight separate reports of abuse or neglect involving Sophia Mason, thwarting the intent of a California law written to enable public scrutiny of government agencies charged with keeping children safe.
The county has made only meager disclosures that contain none of the observations or evidence compiled by investigating social workers — material that is regularly released by other California counties under the terms of the law. Nor did it release any reports it should have made to police regarding the suspected abuse of Sophia. Hayward police have said they received no information which warranted their investigation.
“If Alameda County is actually giving you all of the records that they’re required to, it means no social worker wrote down what they saw and no social worker or supervisor ever got to take a look at what they did,” said Ed Howard, senior counsel with the University of San Diego School of Law Children’s Advocacy Institute, who co-wrote the law mandating disclosure in child death cases, SB 39.
“And that would be horrifying if that was common practice in Alameda County.”
The few records the county did provide show its social workers made glaring errors in assessing Sophia’s risk of future mistreatment and overlooked several red flags that experts say should have prompted a more aggressive response to ensure her safety. At one point, a caseworker checked a box indicating that Sophia’s mother, Samantha Johnson, had no history of drug or alcohol abuse, even though she resided in a sober living home at the time.
Michelle Love, who leads Alameda County DCFS, declined multiple requests for an interview. The agency also did not respond to an extensive list of questions regarding its response to Sophia’s case.
Samantha Johnson is in custody, charged with child abuse and murder, while her boyfriend, Dhante Jackson, suspected of murder and sexual abuse of the girl, is at large.
But aggrieved family members have no doubt where the failure lies.
“Her life could have been saved,” said Sophia’s aunt, Emerald Johnson, a fierce defender of the child and who made at least three of the reports to DCFS last year. “The bottom line is they didn’t believe me. They didn’t believe Sophia.”
“Now,” she added, “her blood is on their hands.”
Sophia Mason poses for pictures during a family photo shoot on July 6, 2019 at a park in Hayward. Her aunt, Emerald Johnson, spent a lot of time with her as she grew up, taking her to the park, birthday parties and her house for sleepovers. (Photos courtesy of Emerald Johnson)
Sophia Mason celebrates the birthday of her grandmother, Sylvia Johnson, in June 2017 at Red Lobster in Hayward. Sylvia said Sophia was an incredibly easy child to raise, adding that she could light up a room with her smile. (Photo courtesy of Emerald Johnson)
Sophia Mason's grandmother and aunt raised her from infancy as her mother would often go missing for months at a time. Her aunt, Emerald Johnson, captured this photo during one of their play sessions in 2014 at Sophia's grandmother's home in Hayward. (Photo courtesy of Emerald Johnson)
Sophia Mason loved animals, including the ones at the petting zoo in Hayward's Kennedy Park. (Photo courtesy of Emerald Johnson)
Sylvia Johnson poses with her granddaughter, Sophia Mason, after Sophia's Kindergarten Christmas performance in December 2017. Sylvia described Sophia as her "little sidekick" who went almost everywhere with her. (Photo courtesy of Florine Thompson)
Sophia Mason always looked forward to the start of a new school year because she would make new friends, according to her relatives. Sophia began the 2021-22 school year at a new school, San Leandro's Jefferson Elementary, but her mother removed her shortly thereafter when they moved to Merced. (Photo courtesy of Florine Thompson)
Just 15 months before her death, the girl relatives affectionately knew as So-So had been an exuberant child — a performer who loved to sing and dance, and doted on the grandmother she’d lived with in Hayward since infancy.
But the horrors she would soon encounter had been foreshadowed, even before she was born.
When relatives learned Samantha Johnson was pregnant at age 21, they immediately worried about her child’s welfare, citing her mental state, drug use and her record of prostitution. Samantha had logged three arrests for solicitation between December 2010 and December 2011 and had long been a client of the Regional Center of the East Bay, an organization that supports people with developmental disabilities.
“She was excited, but I was horrified,” said Melissa Harris, Samantha’s cousin. “To me, Samantha’s intellectual capacity is no greater than that of a 10- to 12-year-old. And no one would say that a 10- to 12-year-old should be taking care of a child.”
After Sophia’s birth on New Year’s Day 2014, Samantha Johnson disappeared for days at a time, leaving Sophia with her grandmother, Sylvia Johnson, her family said. And in March 2014, Alameda County DCFS received its first call about the infant, which relatives said was filed by a family friend who hoped to help the grandmother gain custody of Sophia.
But the responding social worker said they did not identify any safety threats to the infant, and ultimately ruled that the allegations of “severe neglect” were unfounded.
For the next seven years, Samantha remained on the periphery of the girl’s life, while Sophia was raised in Hayward. Despite the extended absences of her mother, Sophia grew up surrounded by an expansive support system, relatives said, including aunts, cousins, neighbors and her grandmother Sylvia, who considered Sophia her “little sidekick.”
As can be seen in the family’s charming home videos, Sophia loved to put on a show, beaming and begging family members to watch. Relatives admired the child’s energetic spirit and compassion for those around her.
SCENES FROM A LIFE TOO SHORT: Sophia Mason was known as an exuberant child — a performer who loved to sing and dance.
“Sophia was such a loving little girl like a little angel on Earth,” said Florine Thompson, the girl’s great-aunt.
“She was just the sweetest little girl,” Emerald Johnson said. “If something was wrong or you were going through something, she was always trying to make you feel better.”
Although multiple relatives considered attempting to adopt Sophia, they said they never saw the necessity of going through the formal process because Samantha seemed to accept the family’s role in raising her daughter.
But in January 2021, shortly after Sophia’s seventh birthday, her mother came back into her life. With what relatives believe was the encouragement of Jackson, her boyfriend, Samantha Johnson began taking an interest in Sophia and sneaking the girl out of her grandmother’s home late at night to take her to Jackson’s home.
That prompted the second DCFS report made in regards to physical abuse of Sophia — one of at least seven complaints that would be made in the last 15 months of her life.
Although the DCFS records which have been heavily redacted by county officials do not provide any details about the allegations, Emerald Johnson said she filed the report after Samantha showed up at her mother’s house in Hayward with police officers to reassert her custody and remove Sophia from the home.
A safety and risk assessment completed by a DCFS social worker found that Sophia faced no safety threats at that time and was not at risk of future mistreatment, though it contains no notes with details from the case worker.
From there, Samantha took Sophia to live with her in a nearby motel, but within six weeks of that report to DCFS, four additional calls were made to the agency regarding concerns that Sophia was being physically abused and neglected, DCFS records show.
Yet in response to each of those calls — made between Feb. 2 and Feb. 22, 2021 — social workers determined that the allegations did not warrant an in-person evaluation nor any further investigation into Sophia’s well-being. Again, the records include no notes from social workers about why those determinations were made.
That was the finding even for a Feb. 11 call, which resulted from an extraordinary effort engineered by Emerald Johnson to save the girl.
Convinced Sophia was in peril, Emerald Johnson persuaded Samantha’s caseworker with the Regional Center, Sophia’s DCFS social worker, and Hayward police to join her in a Hayward park with Sophia and her mother to discuss the girl’s welfare. Police confirmed the meeting, saying that an officer provided security while DCFS conducted interviews.
Sophia, Emerald said, showed up shaking and crying, her body bruised and scabbed. When asked about the markings on her body, Sophia told the DCFS social worker that her mother and Jackson were beating her, Emerald said. But the revelation seemingly had no effect.
“At the park that day, that’s when I feel like they really could have saved her life,” Emerald said. “But then I watched (Samantha and Sophia) both get into the car together as Sophia was crying and shaking and begging to go with me.”
“It was awful,” Emerald added, “traumatizing honestly.”
Though DCFS records acknowledge receipt of two complaints on the date of the meeting, the material made public contains no references to the meeting itself. Instead, the material indicates simply that social workers decided the reports of suspected abuse did not meet their definition of abuse and did not warrant a further investigation.
After the confrontation at the park, relatives didn’t see Samantha or Sophia for several months; evidence suggests the mother took the girl to Southern California. During that same time frame, an OnlyFans page was created and used to post pornographic photos and videos of Samantha from May to September 2021.
Then in June, the pair returned to the Bay Area and Samantha reached out to her family for housing assistance. Relatives were initially thrilled at the news of Sophia’s return, but when they saw her, their excitement quickly deflated.
“When she left, she was a little pudgy but when she came back in June, she was like a rail,” Thompson said of the girl’s appearance. Samantha also seemed to be in bad shape. “It looked like they’d been dragged across the desert. They were dirty and smelly and the baby’s hair was uncombed and matted.”
Emerald Johnson said she spotted a large bruise on her niece’s right forearm.
Sophia, Emerald said, “pulled her arm away from me and said ‘Don’t ask me about it. Mom gets mad.’ I just remember I started crying and hugged her and told her ‘I’m still trying to fight for you.'”
Once again, Emerald called DCFS. And once more, records indicate that no one from the agency was sent out to assess Sophia, no further investigation ensued and no additional services were offered to the family.
After that call, Emerald said, Samantha slowly began cutting most of her family out of Sophia’s life. And yet, one final report was made to DCFS in September — six months before her body was found — when Samantha and Sophia were living in a sober living home in San Leandro.
This time, the scant DCFS records reveal, the complaint came not from relatives but from a “mandated reporter” — someone required by law to report suspicions of abuse.
Around that time, Sophia and her mother were involved in a car accident and they were transported in an ambulance to Kaiser Permanente’s San Leandro Medical Center to be evaluated, according to relatives.
It is unclear who called DCFS this final time to allege that Sophia was being physically abused, but authorities who responded to the crash, medical staff at the hospital and officials at the sober living home where Samantha and Sophia were staying would all fit the description of a mandated reporter.
Alameda County was required to release Sophia’s medical records to this news organization but claimed that none existed.
The DCFS conclusion did not vary, though: “Allegations appear to be unfounded. Case closed.”
In November, Samantha Jonhson was kicked out of the sober living facility for failing to follow the rules such as curfew and cleaning regimens, according to relatives, and she moved with Jackson and Sophia to Merced.
Sophia’s relatives never saw her again.
Thompson said she remembers telling the DCFS caseworker “that something is going to happen to this baby. One day, we’d end up hearing this baby’s story on ’60 Minutes’ and I’m going to blame you for it. No sooner said, months later, it happened.”
The disconnect couldn’t be clearer between the conduct of Alameda County DCFS and the realities of Sophia’s final 15 months. What is difficult to determine, from the sparse records the agency provided this news organization, is why.
Child abuse lawyers who have reviewed the records in Sophia’s case said it appears the agency is attempting to defy SB 39’s requirement that California child welfare agencies release detailed records about any child who dies from abuse or neglect.
Instead, after months of negotiation between the agency and an attorney for this news organization, Alameda County DCFS provided 42 pages of heavily edited records that failed to include any notes taken by employees in the agency’s call center or its social workers. Nor did it include reports submitted to law enforcement — only notations of when those were sent — although the law and DCFS’s own policies indicate such records should be provided.
DCFS’s Love claimed the agency released all required records, and that it would violate privacy laws to provide anything more. But Howard called that response “baffling.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “What this means is that the decision-makers and the public are effectively blocked from looking at this case to determine whether anything could be improved in the future — and that foreshadows more kids dying.”
Even so, the records DCFS did provide reveal errors and inconsistencies that lawyers who specialize in child abuse cases said could have changed the determination of the risks Sophia faced.
For example, Alameda County records indicate that DCFS did not send the required reports to law enforcement about the possible abuse of Sophia in a timely manner, and at least once failed to provide a report at all. Following one of the most worrisome referrals, alleging the physical abuse of Sophia, the agency failed to alert the Hayward Police Department for more than two months, according to the records.
“Different people might make different determinations and it just might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” said Christopher Keane, a San Francisco-based child abuse attorney, explaining the need for police to review DCFS findings. “The point is that more information is better and time is of the essence.”
In another aberration, the county caseworker who responded to the final complaint to DCFS about Sophia’s care incorrectly marked that Samantha Johnson did not have a criminal history and said that she had no history of using drugs or alcohol — although DCFS had been informed repeatedly of Samantha’s history, and both the mother and daughter were staying at the sober living home at the time.
“If you fill out the information incorrectly, then the recommendation is pretty useless,” said Carly Sanchez, the family’s lawyer. “So although Sophia’s safety assessments kept coming up safe, I don’t know how trustworthy those responses are when I know they’re not plugging in the correct answers every time.”
Even if social workers concluded they lacked evidence to remove Sophia from her mother’s care, they had an array of other intervention options such as creating a family safety plan, conducting regular case management meetings or requesting a forensic exam of Sophia away from her mother’s presence. It appears none of those options were employed.
“Anytime you get more than three or four referrals on the same kid, something is not right,” said an Alameda County DCFS employee who spoke to this news organization anonymously. “It should probe us to go look a little harder, but that didn’t happen here.”
A Merced police report filed in Samantha Johnson’s court case sheds additional light on some of the horrors Sophia endured — and raises even more questions about the conduct of Alameda County social workers.
In early March, Samantha Johnson called her mother, Sylvia, and said she was coming back to the Bay Area without her daughter because she “gave her away.” Alarmed, the family called Hayward police, who then arrested Samantha and alerted authorities in Merced.
Armed with a search warrant, Merced police detectives knocked down the front door of the home leased by Jackson and found Sophia’s lifeless body.
In an interview with detectives after the disturbing discovery, Samantha Johnson described a DCFS case in Alameda County where “there was an allegation of Jackson touching (Sophia) in the crotch area,” the report states. She also told detectives that no forensic exam was completed on Sophia at that time.
Without any notes from social workers, it is unclear when that allegation was made to DCFS and what was done about it.
Samantha Johnson told police that she had been dating Jackson for about two years and that he began physically and sexually abusing Sophia when they were still living in the Bay Area. According to the police report, her cell phone included visual evidence of the sexual abuse.
Samantha Johnson said that Jackson’s abuse escalated after moving to Merced and that they at times left Sophia in a metal shed in their backyard as punishment. She also admitted to disciplining her child on her own, including burning Sophia’s leg with a hot spoon and choking her on at least one occasion.
When asked what she thought forensic exams would indicate when experts checked Sophia’s body, the police report states Samantha Johnson replied that “it was going to show that her daughter was raped.”
More than three months after Sophia’s body was discovered, it remains in the custody of the Merced County Coroner’s Office. The cause of her death has not been released, pending the culmination of an autopsy and toxicology report.
But Sophia’s family is determined that her death will not be in vain.
“The system failed Sophia but we don’t want it to fail another child,” said Sylvia Johnson, Sophia’s grandmother. “They shouldn’t have to go through what she went through.”
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