Remembering Sofia, who went missing 7 years ago

Every customer who climbs the steps to enter Art Carpenter's Hardware on Columbia Drive comes face to face with a tattered and torn poster showing the smiling face of Sofia Juarez.

The words "Endangered" and "Missing" have framed the black and white photograph for seven years.

Gary Carpenter, who owns the Kennewick business started by his father, said the stained and sun-bleached poster featuring a cherub-faced child will stay put until the mystery of Sofia's disappearance on Feb. 4, 2003, is solved.

Sofia was one day short of her fifth birthday when she apparently was abducted that evening while walking a few blocks to a grocery store from her family home off Washington Street at 15th Avenue.

The missing girl case mobilized hundreds of volunteers who searched widely throughout Kennewick in following days.

Walking shoulder to shoulder, people scanned fields, in canals, under bridges, even peering behind skirts of mobile homes and in garbage cans, hoping to find her or at least a clue.

But Sofia's disappearance was a complete vanishing.

Posters, like the one Carpenter keeps in plain sight, were distributed widely. The girl's picture and story found publicity through the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and were displayed on a race car on TV, on several semi-trucks and even an electronic billboard in New York City's Times Square.

But the best efforts of Kennewick police, aided by FBI agents and seasoned missing persons investigators brought in from as far away as Arizona, couldn't find Sofia.

Kennewick's detective Wes Gardner is the latest detective to be assigned to the cold case that Carpenter can't forget.

"It's frustrating. We get calls and tips. But they are pretty much what we've already heard," said Gardner, who has been plowing through "a mountain of paperwork" on the case since April.

"I'm looking at everything with a fresh mind," said Gardner. He's revisited key witnesses too, including the girl's grandmother and sister.

Sofia's 26-year-old mother died a year ago of medical complications in California.

Gardner said with not much of anything new to go on, the investigation has to rely on what others have done before him. Maybe, he said, he will see some hidden clues buried in those thousands of investigative reports that will help solve the mystery.

But more likely, Sofia's disappearance won't be explained until someone who was involved breaks the long silence.

"It'll have to come from someone close to what happened. We need to have that person," Gardner said.

The detective said Sofia's closest relatives want the mystery solved.

"They are totally ready and want closure on this," he said.

Even after all these years, posters of the smiling girl, missing four upper teeth, with a straw hat perched on her head, pique public interest.

"I talked to a lady a couple of weeks ago who had seen a poster of Sofia. It jogged her memory," Gardner said.

Unfortunately, the woman shared information Gardner had heard before.

There are various Sofia legends: that her body was buried near Jump-off Joe or in a field near Finley, that someone kidnapped her and took her to a relative in Mexico, or that a van of nondescript color stopped on Washington Street so someone could pull the girl inside and sped off, never to be seen again.

"We really don't have it locked down what really happened. Technically it is a missing person case," Gardner said.

Carpenter said customers notice Sofia's poster and comment about it about twice a week.

Gardner said two possibilities are that Sofia's abduction was a crime of opportunity or it was premeditated. But it does not appear to be a serial abduction, he said.

"My hope is whoever abducted her did it for some other reason (than to harm her)," Gardner said.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children still has Sofia listed on its website.

-- John Trumbo: 509-582-1529; jtrumbo@tricityherald.com