Extensive Search Finds No Trace of Newhall Girl, 7

A 7-year-old Newhall girl who disappeared Thursday afternoon was still missing Friday evening despite efforts by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who searched for her on foot, horseback and in helicopters.

Sara Nan Hodges, a blonde, blue-eyed first-grader, was last seen about 2 p.m. with a group of neighborhood children in the front yard of her home, deputies said. The family reported the girl missing at 8 p.m.

After interviewing neighbors and the children she was playing with Thursday night, deputies used bloodhounds and a helicopter to search for the girl in the rough, brushy area across the street from her Alderbrook Drive home.

At daybreak, the search was expanded to include more than 80 officers, including a mounted posse and dozens of deputies on foot who covered a two-square-mile area.

False Lead

Expectations were raised briefly about 3:30 p.m. Friday when authorities acting on a phone tip stopped a car on the Antelope Valley Freeway in which a child matching Sara’s description was a passenger. But family members said it was not Sara.

The ground search was called off about 5 p.m. Friday.

“It’s fruitless,” said Sgt. Frank Kasco. “We have had more than 74 people out there all day, bloodhounds and helicopters, and she is just not there.”

Kasco said officers would continue to search the surrounding residential neighborhood and follow up on any tips. However, Lt. Dennis Burns said they had few other leads.

“All the kids went off their different ways. Everybody remembers she was there, but nobody knows what she did next,” he said. “Any place a 7-year-old would go we have been. Friends, relatives, abandoned cars . . . somebody either picked her up or she wandered off.”

Family members fear that Sara has been kidnaped because they said she never goes anywhere without asking permission first.

Always Careful

“This is extremely unlike her,” said her sister Tisha, 16. “Before she goes anywhere, she asks and she never leaves this block. We always know exactly where she is. She comes in before it gets dark and that’s why we got worried when it started getting dark.

“We want her home,” Tisha said.

Sara’s parents are divorced, but authorities said they do not believe that the girl was taken by her father, who lives in Ventura County.

Burns said Sara’s father, Wallace Scott Mann, first learned that she was missing when law enforcement officials, who thought that she might be at his house, searched it. Since then, he has been eager to help, Burns said.

Sara is about 4 feet tall and weighs about 80 pounds. She was wearing blue jeans, a pink and blue T-shirt, and tennis shoes at the time she disappeared.