Disappearance of Sofia Juarez

Sofia Lucerno Juarez (born February 5, 1998) was a 4-year-old American child who disappeared in Kennewick, Washington in 2003. Her case involved the first use of an Amber alert in the state of Washington. As of 2021, Juarez's whereabouts and the circumstances of her disappearance remain unknown.
Background.
Juarez lived in a house on the 100 block on East 15th Avenue in east Kennewick, Washington. She lived with her mother, Maria Juarez; her grandmother, Ignacia Prado Juarez; her grandmother's boyfriend, Jose Lopez Torres; her siblings, including a younger brother; her six aunts and uncles; and other relatives. Maria Juarez had moved to Washington from California to live with her mother about two years prior, but their family was originally from Mexico. At the time of the disappearance, Maria Juarez was 20 years old. Juarez's father, Andres Gutierrez Abrajan, had no contact with the Juarez family and denied being Sofia's father. Sofia's grandfather, Jose Luis Juarez, did not live at the residence but would join the family shortly after the disappearance.
Juarez was 4 years old at the time of her disappearance. She had black hair and brown eyes, with a mole under one eye and a birthmark on her lower back. At the time of her disappearance she stood tall, weighed , and was missing her four upper front teeth. She also had pierced ears.
Disappearance.
Juarez disappeared on Tuesday, February 4, 2003, one day before her fifth birthday. She had been playing with some of her relatives, variously described in the media as her brother or young aunts and uncles. Jose Lopez Torres, her grandmother's boyfriend, was preparing to leave for a nearby convenience store and had asked the children if they wanted to join him. Although the others refused, Sofia decided to take him up on the offer at the last minute. Torres, however, was not aware she had changed her mind and left the house without Sofia.
Around this time, Sofia entered her bedroom to ask her mother for a dollar to spend at the store. Maria watched Sofia leave the room and heard her close the door as she left the house. The last confirmed sighting of Sofia was by her mother, when she left the room at around 20:25 PST that evening. When she left the house, Juarez was wearing a red long-sleeved shirt, blue overalls, violet socks, white Converse sneakers, and gold hoop earrings. Although temperature outside was roughly , she left the house without a coat.
After arriving at the store, Torres purchased milk and made a call at a payphone to relatives in Mexico before returning home at 21:45. Back at the house, he and Maria became aware of the miscommunication and that Sofia had nonetheless left the house to join him. Other family members had believed Sofia was playing in the house or outside. After quickly searching for her daughter, Maria contacted police at 21:23.
Investigation.
Initial searches.
Detective Sgt. Randy Maynard was the on-duty patrol sergeant supervising all police traffic in Kennewick on the night Juarez disappeared. Maynard found the circumstances of the report - particularly the time of day, cold weather conditions, and Juarez's age - made it unlikely that she had wandered off or was hiding. Police arrived at the Juarez home at 21:26, three minutes after the call was made. Two officers were tasked with searching the house and yard while another officer interviewed Maria Juarez. The search radius was increased to a radius centred on the house. Six or eight uniformed officers from the local police department were available to assist in the search, but hundreds of officers and firefighters from nearby detachments joined the investigation. One of the first officers to respond to the scene was Sgt. Ken Lattin, who would later serve as lead investigator on the case.
It was quickly ruled out that Juarez had gone missing due to an injury or becoming lost, and her case was almost immediately treated as a likely abduction. An Amber alert - the first in Washington's history - was issued by the Office of Emergency Management shortly after authorities confirmed she was not in the home. The alert was cancelled after 36 hours, though police claim it had a pronounced effect on the community and was responsible for them receiving thousands of tips in the early days of the investigation. Other reports suggested police had only received 184 tips in the first 8 days of the investigation. After the Amber alert expired, Kennewick police Sgt. Rick Dopke reassured the media they were "still treating it as an abduction".
Volunteers participated in a search of rural areas outside Kennewick on the day after the disappearance, but police ended the use of volunteer searchers on February 6. False rumors circulated early in the investigation suggested Juarez had been found, but all were denied by police. The state police union offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to her return. On February 8, police searched three residences in Kennewick and Burbank with police dogs; the Burbank home belonged to the mother of murderer Jeremy Vargas Sagastegui, who objected to police searching her home and claimed detectives were attempting to pressure her and her sons into admitting to an attack on Juarez. A fourth home was searched three days later after the man who lived there made a suspicious comment about the disappearance in a sexually-explicit phone call to a stranger; police later determined he had no connection to the case, but charged him with telephone harassment. Police dive teams began searching the Columbia River for Juarez's body on February 13, but found nothing. A military helicopter equipped with infrared detection equipment was lent to the search by the Washington Army National Guard, surveying areas in and near Kennewick where investigators discovered a pair of overalls and girl's shoes, though neither belonged to Sofia.
For the first 45 days after Juarez was reported missing, the entire Kennewick police department was focused on solving her case, as were agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At least four detectives served as lead investigator on the case in the first eight years of the investigation. According to police, the role of lead investigator is assigned to a different person every few years to bring new perspectives to the forefront.
Juarez's mother, Maria, and her grandmother, Ignacia, travelled to Puebla, Mexico in March 2003 to search for leads in the investigation.
Public response.
A candlelit vigil and march was held for Juarez on February 11, 2003, one week after the disappearance. The vigil began at the Juarez home and saw about 300 people march from the house to St. Joseph's Church. By the third week of the search for Sofia, the Juarez family had removed the public memorial established outside their home.
On March 1, 2003, NASCAR racer Damon Lusk, a graduate of Kennewick's Kamiakin High School, participated in the Busch Series race with a 20x50-inch photo of Juarez emblazoned on his car's trunk. Lusk and Tommy Baldwin Racing had announced they would donate the space seventeen days into the search for Juarez, forfeiting sponsorship revenue in the hopes that it would raise awareness for her case.
Juarez's case was featured on "America's Most Wanted" less than three weeks after she had vanished. The initial broadcast generated 13 phone tips from as far afield as New York. She was also featured on subsequent episodes in September 2003 and March 2004.
Juarez has been featured in two campaigns to raise the public profile of missing persons in Washington using semi-trailer trucks as mobile billboards. The first was carried out with the company Gordon Trucking. The "Homeward Bound" awareness campaign, a collaborative effort between the Washington State Patrol Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit and Kam-Way Transportation, unveiled trucks bearing Juarez's likeness on February 4, 2021. The trucks showcase details of cases such as Juarez's as they travel through the Pacific Northwest and beyond. In her Homeward Bound posters, a photo of Juarez at age 4 appears next to an age-progressed photo of how she may have looked at age 17.
Her missing poster has been exhibited in Times Square, New York City; and at the annual Benton-Franklin Fair & Rodeo in Kennewick.
Current status.
In late 2007 or early 2008, Maria Juarez's family moved back to California. In mid-2008, she gave birth to another child. Maria Juarez died in Sacramento on January 10, 2009 from medical complications, nearly six years after her daughter's disappearance. She was cremated and on January 16 her funerary procession carried her ashes from the corner of East 15th Ave and Washington Street to the St. Joseph's Church, the same route followed by the February 2003 candlelit vigil for her daughter. In statements to the media after her death, Maria's family stated that she had never given up hope Sofia would eventually be found.
In 2015, Kennewick Police Chief Ken Hohenberg asked retired Richland police Capt. Al Wehner to review nine cold cases from the area. Juarez's disappearance is one of the cases Wehner has looked into, and as of February 2021 he was the lead investigator. A new police effort to further the investigation was launched in December 2020. Sgt. Randy Maynard also remains part of the search. According to police, their case file on the Juarez case is more than 20,000 pages long. In May 2021, a video on TikTok was published with a 22-year-old woman who resembled age-progressed images of Sofia, leading the Kennewick Police to open an investigation into the video.
Theories.
Police believe Juarez attempted to follow her grandmother's boyfriend to the store after realizing he had left without her. Although it was located only a few blocks from the home, Juarez never arrived at the store. Video surveillance taken from the store confirmed Torres's version of events was accurate. Kennewick Police Chief Marc Harden told the media in 2003 "everyone and no one is a person of interest". In a 2011 interview, police detective Sgt. Randy Maynard said he believed Juarez was still alive: "My gut is that she’s alive ... If she’s deceased, we’d have found her remains". In 2013, Sgt. Ken Lattin told media "we don't have any evidence that she's still alive, we don't have any evidence that she's not still alive".
Possible sightings.
The shortest route to the store would have taken Juarez west on the street where she lived - East 15th Ave - and then north on Washington Street. A local resident who lived on Washington Street reported to police that she had spotted a young girl crossing the street in front of her car while she was stopped at either 14th or 15th Ave. Police believe this was the last sighting of Juarez.
A relative of Juarez, who was 10 years old at the time, also claimed to have seen her the evening of her disappearance, though his account has not been confirmed. According to this version of events, Juarez was seen walking down the driveway outside her home with a man dressed in a black sweatshirt, black pants, and black shoes.
Witnesses also reported seeing two suspicious vans in the area around the time of Juarez's disappearance. The first was a panel van seen in the area around the time of the disappearance, described as a mid-1980s model with silver or light blue paint and no windows along the body. The second was a full-size, mid-1990s model van with faded orange paint and a license plate containing the letters "JJ", allegedly driven by a white man roughly 35-40 years old with a thick blond beard. It is unknown if either vehicle or their drivers had any role in the disappearance. Another witness also suggested they had seen a teenage Hispanic boy and a young Hispanic girl around the time Juarez left the house.
False leads.
Pieces of a skull were discovered by a farmer in a field south of Ritzville on August 12, 2006 after a fire destroyed a patch of waist-high weeds which had obscured the bones. The field had previously been searched in 2003 after Juarez's disappearance, and again in 2004 following the disappearance of 11-year-old Cody Haynes. The remains were sent to the King County Medical Examiner's Office to be DNA tested, but the results were inconclusive. In 2007, radiocarbon dating revealed the skull fragments were at least 600 years old, and could not have belonged to Juarez or Haynes.
In 2011, police detective Wes Gardner (then the lead investigator on the case) told media that he was working with the Long Beach Police Department to investigate a tip which suggested a teenager named "Sofia Juarez" of a similar age had been found on Facebook living in Long Beach, California. It was ultimately found that this was not the same girl who had disappeared in 2003.
Abduction by family.
Juarez's father, who had never had a relationship with Sofia, was cooperative with investigators. He was ruled out as a suspect within forty-eight hours of her disappearance, providing a verifiable alibi to police.
Detective Sgt. Randy Maynard has claimed that someone close with the Juarez family previously suggested there were concerns that someone in the extended family was unhappy with the way Maria Juarez was raising her daughter, raising the possibility that Sofia had been abducted by a family member and taken elsewhere, possibly to Mexico. 
Abduction by strangers.
Sofia's mother, Maria Juarez, claimed after the disappearance that her daughter was shy and would not have gone with any stranger willingly. Maria Jaurez believed that Sofia would only have gone away willingly with somebody she was familiar with. Investigators have looked into the possibility that Juarez was abducted by a stranger and murdered, or may remain alive but held against her will. Early on the investigation, known sex offenders in the area were contacted by police; at the time, Kennewick was home to 167 registered sex offenders.
A recurring theory investigated by the Kennewick Police Department suggests that Juarez was struck by a driver. According to this version of events, Juarez was hit by a vehicle while crossing East 15th Avenue and injured. The occupants of the vehicle exited to check on her and found she was alive, but rather than contacting authorities decided to put her inside the vehicle and leave the scene, transporting her to another location where she was murdered and buried. Various local sites, including Hover Park in Finley and Jump Off Joe south of Kennewick, have been suggested as possible burial sites. Detective Sgt. Randy Maynard has claimed that tipsters repeatedly named specific individuals with ties to the local drug culture and histories of narcotics use as the culprits, and that these persons have been thoroughly investigated, as have the vehicles they were operating at the time of Juarez's disappearance. Although search warrants were executed against the suspects, forensic analysis conducted by the Washington State Patrol crime lab and the FBI failed to produce any evidence confirming these accusations. Investigators consider the story to be nothing more than an urban legend.
Another tip reported repeatedly to police suggests that Juarez was murdered and her body was buried in the hills near Kennewick, and that she had been exhumed and reburied multiple times to hide evidence from investigators.