Dead Girl’s Relatives Released From Jail : Investigation: Grandmother and aunt of Marquishia Shanee Candler are freed after prosecutors

The grandmother and aunt of a 5-year-old Ontario girl whose body was found in the desert this week were ordered to be released from jail Thursday because no criminal charges had been filed against them within the time required by law.

The order does not mean the grandmother, Bertha Toombs, 49, and the aunt, Renee Lloyd, 32, have been exonerated in the death of Marquishia Shanee Candler, officials said. The case is under investigation and the women could be rearrested, they said.

“We are not in a position where we can make a decision on filing charges,” said Richard Maxwell, chief deputy district attorney for San Bernardino County. “We’re not finished reviewing the evidence, but the case is not over by any means.”

Maxwell said that his office is still in the process of interpreting the findings of an autopsy performed Tuesday and that he is awaiting results from additional medical tests. In addition, police are still gathering information.

He would not discuss the case further, but he has indicated that investigators also are reviewing earlier reports of possible child abuse involving Marquishia and one of her brothers while they were in Toombs’ care.

Two such reports, one from medical personnel and one from school personnel, were made to authorities in May, 1991, while the children were living with Toombs. She was being paid by the state to care for the two children and seven of their siblings and cousins.

Marquishia’s mother is in a drug rehabilitation halfway house in Los Angeles, police said. Her father is serving a five-year prison sentence at the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi.

Officials of the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services, the agency that placed Marquishia with her grandmother in 1990, said Thursday that a court order had been imposed on them by the Juvenile Court this week preventing them from talking about the case.

A source within the department, however, said neither police nor investigators from the Department of Children’s Services could find enough evidence to substantiate reports that Marquishia had been abused. The same conclusion was reached on the brother, according to the principal at the school the two children attended.

But the source said Children’s Services officials were going over Marquishia’s files “with a very fine-toothed comb” to determine if the agency overlooked something that suggested that the child was an abuse victim.

The order to release Lloyd and Toombs from the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga came 48 hours after Lloyd was booked on suspicion of murder and Toombs was booked on suspicion of being an accessory to murder. Police are prohibited from holding suspects for longer than that without charging them with a crime.

The women, according to police, have said that Marquishia accidentally drowned Sept. 22 while bathing and that Lloyd panicked when she found the body and tried to conceal the death.

Last week, Lloyd and Toombs falsely reported that Marquishia disappeared at the Fox Hills Mall in Culver City after the family went there on a shopping trip.

They recanted the story five days later under intense questioning.

Times staff writer Sheryl Stolberg contributed to this story.