Body of Missing 5-Year-Old Girl Found : Media: A chain reaction of misunderstandings is blamed for erroneous news reports that girl was found safe after security guard said he spotted the child in car.

The Los Angeles Times and other local news organizations erroneously reported Tuesday that Marquishia Shanee Candler had apparently been found safe and her abductors were arrested. The reports were the result of a chain of events that began when a restaurant security guard believed he saw the missing girl Monday night.

In fact, authorities said, the 5-year-old had been dead for days and her family’s report that she had been kidnaped from a Culver City mall was part of a hoax to cover up her death.

The Times report and others, including a broadcast by KCBS Channel 2, were largely based on late night interviews Monday with Mitch Grace, a former Los Angeles police officer who now works as a security guard at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in South Los Angeles.

Grace told reporters he had spotted the missing girl, reported the sighting to the Los Angeles Police Department and that arrests had resulted. Additionally, a man who identified himself as the girl’s uncle also showed up at the fast food stand following the KCBS broadcast and told reporters Culver City police had told him “everything was OK.” Culver City police declined to comment on Grace’s assertions Monday night, saying only that the case had been solved and that there would be a press conference in the morning.

The Times published an eight-paragraph article in most editions of Tuesday’s Metro section reporting that the girl had been found and her abductors arrested.

The Times’ metropolitan editor, Craig Turner, said that Grace misled reporters by identifying himself as an off-duty LAPD officer. In fact, he left the department in 1991.

Grace denied on Tuesday that he ever identified himself as a police officer, though on local TV newscasts he was identified as such in live interviews and did not correct the reporters. Los Angeles police also said Grace identified himself as a police officer when they took a report on the supposed sighting of the girl.

“This incident illustrates the perils of reporting on deadline in a competitive atmosphere,” said Turner. “We had a story that was based on what turned out to be erroneous information. It broke very late at night, after 11 p.m. Had it been earlier, those errors would have been uncovered by additional reporting and cross-checking. But when our final, home edition deadline hit at midnight, we had to make a decision on whether to publish what we had or leave out the story entirely. We chose to go ahead and publish, and in retrospect it was the wrong decision. We should have been more cautious and we recognize this was a serious error.”

The incident that resulted in the story began at 7 p.m. Monday when Los Angeles police received a report from Grace that the missing girl had been spotted in a car in the drive-through lane at the restaurant where he worked near Crenshaw Boulevard and Slauson Avenue.

Two officers from the 77th Street Division went to the restaurant and took the information and license plate number from Grace so that it could be forwarded to Culver City police, Los Angeles Police Sgt. Roger Dunning said. Grace identified himself as an off-duty officer, Dunning said.

Meanwhile, Culver City police announced Monday night that the abduction case was solved but refused to release details until the press conference. Grace said Tuesday that after seeing a television report that the case was solved he mistakenly believed that his information had helped and that the girl had been found alive. He called The Times to tell his story.

The Times came to the same conclusions as Grace in its reporting, largely because Grace was thought to be a police officer and because Culver City police refused to deny the information he had provided.

Grace called the erroneous reports a chain reaction of misunderstandings. He blamed the Culver City police for not immediately clearing it up.

“Everybody was jumping to conclusions until we had a complete story,” he said. “All Culver City had to do was deny or confirm.”

Culver City Police Chief Ted Cooke said when reporters called about Grace’s statements, his officers didn’t feel any obligation to correct the erroneous reports.

A spokeswoman for KCBS declined to comment on the story other than to say the station’s Monday night newscast did not definitively report that the girl had been found, but rather said there were “encouraging signs” that the girl was located.