Search Fails to Find Girl Missing From Mall

After spending the night scouring a Culver City mall in an unsuccessful search for a missing 5-year-old, police Thursday sought the public’s help in finding the child, who disappeared during a family shopping trip.

More than a dozen police officers and firefighters canvassed houses door-to-door Thursday in neighborhoods around the Fox Hills Mall, questioning residents and handing out flyers with a picture of the missing child, Marquisha Shanee Candler, of Ontario.

Police also arranged for a military airplane from the El Toro Marine base to scout the area around the mall after sundown with an infrared heat-sensing device.

The girl was last seen Wednesday at about 4:15 p.m. just inside the second floor entrance to a May Company store, said Capt. Paul Moncur of the Culver City Police Department. She had arrived at the mall just minutes before with her grandmother--who has custody of the 5-year-old--and an aunt and five other youngsters, Moncur said.

“They had not been in the mall 30 seconds and the grandmother looked around and she was gone,” Moncur said.

The family traveled to Los Angeles to visit relatives and had decided to shop before returning to Ontario. Moncur said police cannot rule out the possibility that a parent or some other relative took the child as part of a family dispute--though there is no evidence that such a dispute exists.

One investigator, Sgt. Hank Davies, said he did not believe that was the case.

In the first hours of the search, investigators hoped Marquisha merely had wandered away and fallen asleep in some hard-to-find spot in the vicinity of the cavernous, three-story, 150-store mall at Sepulveda Boulevard and Slauson Avenue, or in the surrounding wooded hills.

Bertha Toombs, 57, the child’s grandmother, told police that Marquisha sometimes vanished inside their home, only to be found asleep in a closet.

Moncur said officers arrived within an hour of the child’s disappearance and searched the inside of the mall. After it closed for the night, police again searched the mall with six police dogs.

“We emptied all the trash compactors and all the trash bins and searched service corridors,” Moncur said. Police checked ditches, drainage pipe openings and brushy areas outside the mall.

Officers returned to the mall Thursday morning and asked merchants to search their stores.

The child, who is African-American, stands 3-feet 6-inches tall and weighs from 35 to 40 pounds. She has dark sandy hair and is missing a right front tooth. She was last seen wearing a light blue blouse with a blue ribbon at the collar. She wore dark blue slacks and white tennis shoes.

The child probably does not know her address or any other personal information except her name, Moncur said.

Anyone with any information may report it--anonymously if necessary--to the Culver City Police Department at (310) 202-5608.