Alameda County waited years to investigate failures before Sophia Mason’s death. The inquiry took 45 hours

Despite initial vows for an independent investigation, Alameda County’s leaders waited more than four years after Sophia Mason’s death in 2022 to begin their much-publicized inquiry into her social workers’ failings, newly obtained documents show.

County leaders held off until April 3 of this year to hire anyone to conduct the probe of her case, according to a contract and invoice obtained under a California Public Records Act request, even as many of the same problems that preceded her death continued at the county’s Department of Children and Family Services.

The inquiry that resulted has drawn criticism from child welfare advocates, partly due to the fact that the investigator billed the county for about 45 hours of work, which did not include conducting any interviews, the records show.

Alameda County’s Social Services Agency has refused to say whether any employees were disciplined, nor whether any of the social workers who handled Sophia’s case remain employed with the county, calling such a public release an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

U.S. Rep.-elect Aisha Wahab — who has represented Hayward in the state Senate since 2022 — criticized Alameda County supervisors’ apparent lack of urgency and called their approach “mindboggling.”

She stressed how their reluctance to push for a faster inquiry marked a significant departure from elsewhere in the Bay Area — particularly in Santa Clara County, where some county supervisors had taken on a more vocal role in pushing for reforms amid a string of child deaths in recent years.

“What we are seeing is the (Alameda County) Board of Supervisors has lacked accountability, lacked urgency and lacked the will to do their job,” Wahab said.

In an interview with this news outlet, Supervisor Nate Miley said he’d “be the first to acknowledge it took a long time” to complete the investigation. But he defended the resulting report and said “we didn’t take this lightly.”

Fellow supervisors Elisa Marquez and Lena Tam issued statements defending the county’s approach to reforming its child welfare system, but neither granted interviews or directly addressed the yearslong delay in beginning the investigation. In a text, Supervisor David Haubert said “we need to discipline our staff at all levels from the top down to ensure we never experience a tragedy like this again.” He did not address the delay in starting the investigation.

Nikki Fortunato Bas, who joined the board in January 2025, said she could not recall the specifics of when the county counsel said it began its investigation. Still, she said the county was making improvements — particularly since the fall 2025 audit was released — and that “compliance isn’t enough, we have to really transform our child welfare system.”

Wahab suggested across-the-board “culture issues” were to blame for the county’s failings. The yearslong delay in initiating the investigation coincided with a cascade of problems at the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, the lead agency tasked with responding to reports of child abuse and neglect.

In late July, state social services officials placed the county under new state oversight after a site visit earlier this year revealed myriad failures across the agency, such as hour-long wait times on its abuse hotline and shoddy work by social workers. The move followed two separately commissioned reports — one by state auditors in fall 2025, and another by a civil grand jury in summer 2023 — that also raised alarms about the county’s staffing levels and its ability to respond quickly to reports of abuse.

“It is a culture of failure, a culture of dismissal and a culture of a lack of accountability,” added Wahab, who created a task force earlier this year aimed at reforming those agencies. She also called for the firings of Alameda County Social Services Agency Director Andrea Ford and Department of Children and Family Services Director Michelle Love

Miley, however, voiced confidence in Ford’s ability to lead the system, and suggested it was her job to decide whether to keep Love on board. An unsigned email from Alameda County Social Services Agency’s office of public affairs declined to comment on the Wahab’s remarks about Ford and Love, and instead stressed the agency is working with the state “to strengthen accountability, improve practice, and enhance child safety.”

Sophia’s emaciated body was found decomposing in March 2022 at a house in Merced, where she had spent the final few months of her life living in a shed.

Subsequent reporting by the Bay Area News Group found widespread failures by local social workers in the year before Sophia’s death — prompting outrage from Miley, who called the girl’s death “really effed up,” as well as Haubert, who lamented how “something obviously failed.”

In May 2023, the two supervisors — alongside Marquez, Tam and Keith Carson, who has since retired from the board — voted to commission an independent investigation into the county’s handling of Sophia’s case. At the time, Marquez called it “an opportunity to learn from this huge loss and do better.”

In approving the inquiry, the supervisors mandated that it happen “in conjunction with” a then-newly filed lawsuit by Sophia’s grandmother, which alleged numerous failings on the part of social workers who handled Sophia’s case.

Miley said this week the board was “advised by county counsel” to run the investigation alongside the lawsuit, and “that’s the route we chose to follow.”

The resulting 34-page report — released in early August as county supervisors approved a $12 million settlement of the lawsuit brought by Sophia’s grandmother — listed more than 40 deficiencies in how the county handled her case. It also included 25 recommendations for reforms within the agency.

A host of child welfare advocates have since criticized the investigation as not offering enough insight into why county employees acted as they did. The county-hired investigator — longtime Southern California licensed clinical worker Mayola Miranda — did not interview anyone for her inquiry, and instead based her conclusions on the transcripts of five depositions collected during the lawsuit against the county, along with police records, county case files and media reports.

An invoice obtained by this news outlet shows Miranda charged the county $8,812.50 for about 45 hours of work on an “expert witness report” and “correspondence/meetings with county counsel.” The rate included a $2,500 discount as a “good will credit for services rendered,” the document shows.

The county’s contract with Miranda called for her to complete the investigative report by May 15, 2026, six weeks after her contract for the job was signed by interim Counsel Andrea Weddle.

While Miranda’s report “superbly” detailed county employees’ actions, it was “bizarrely deficient” in its absence of any analysis into why county employees acted as they did, said Ed Howard, senior counsel with the University of San Diego School of Law Children’s Advocacy Institute. He expressed shock that it took the county so long to even start the inquiry.

“The board wouldn’t have allowed four years to go by — and spent about the same amount of money as a family of four going for a week to Disneyland — if it was their own kids that had been murdered,” Howard said. More kids, he added, “will continue to die until the board members take this as seriously as if it were their own children.”

The county supervisors’ approach to Sophia’s case “feels so disingenuous,” said Carly Sanchez, an attorney who represented the girl’s grandmother in a recently settled lawsuit against the county.

“There was no urgency to that alleged intent,” said Sanchez, recalling the public vows by multiple county supervisors in 2022 and 2023 to investigate the case.

“How many other kids,” she added, “were left in dangerous situations or hurt in the ensuing three or four years while the county sat on its hands and opted not to do an investigation?”

Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at [email protected].