Editorial: 8-year-old’s horrific death needs outside investigation
“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.”
Pause and reread that paragraph again. Let the horror of the scene sink in.
It’s the description of an 8-year-old girl found dead in March. As journalist Maggie Angst reported last Sunday, Sophia Mason had been repeatedly physically and sexually abused.
Sophia’s mother, Samantha Johnson, charged with child abuse and murder, is in custody in Merced County. Johnson’s boyfriend, Dhante Jackson, who is suspected of murdering and sexually abusing the girl, is at large.
But Merced is only where little Sophia was found dead. She had lived most of her life in Alameda County. And that’s where county Department of Children and Family Services workers had received at least eight separate reports of abuse or neglect involving Sophia in the 15 months before her body was found.
Yet they failed to act.
This was a preventable death. It didn’t happen under the radar. County social workers had been warned and repeatedly dismissed concerns, according to the crumbs of records the county has released. And since Angst’s report last week on the bureaucratic bungling of Sophia’s case, county officials have stonewalled, refusing to even answer questions.
Legislators should press for the state auditor to review the case. District Attorney Nancy O’Malley should probe whether there was criminal misconduct by county workers. And county supervisors, if they care about getting at the truth more than protecting their staff, should be commissioning an independent outside investigation.
Instead, of the five county supervisors, there’s been silence from Keith Carson, Richard Valle and David Brown. Nate Miley has said, “it’s really effed up what happened to this young Sophia.” And David Haubert promises, “I’m going to ask questions internally.”
It’s political lip service. None of them seems to get it. Asking for answers internally isn’t the answer. Asking for answers from the same administration that let this happen won’t get at the root of the problem.
Michelle Love, head of Alameda County’s Department of Children and Family Services, County Counsel Donna Ziegler and County Administrator Susan Muranishi have refused to respond to inquiries from this news organization. Muranishi, the most highly compensated county administrator in the state in 2020, went so far Tuesday as to physically dodge a reporter who sought her comment.
At some point, top county administrators and county supervisors should ask themselves whether they’re serving the public or hiding from it. If they care about protecting the most vulnerable among us, then they should welcome an independent outside review of what happened.
For this is not the first time Alameda County child welfare workers have dropped the ball and a child has died.
In 2015, a 3-year-old girl, Mariah Sultana Mustafa, placed in a foster home by Alameda County, died after overdosing on methamphetamine for the second time in 13 days. Two Alameda County social workers had allowed the child to remain at the foster care home after the first overdose. Litigation in that case is still pending with a trial scheduled for November.
In that case, county officials circled the wagons, refusing to release documents about Mariah’s death — documents that should be made public under state law designed to cast sunshine on cases of neglect or abuse.
They’re doing it again, this time blocking release of key public documents about Sophia. Alameda County officials seem hellbent on keeping secret how these innocent children died. What’s needed is an independent investigation and a dose of transparency.
Otherwise, more children are likely to die.