Body Found in Garage Is Identified as Anaheim Girl’s : Death: Police say Marie Asu, found Thursday, had been dead for at least 10 days. But rumors about her death had been circulating for days.

The busy neighborhood had buzzed for days with rumors of a dead person in the garage at 1923 E. Grove Ave.

But no one had bothered to check inside the cluttered, windowless garage, or call police, who Friday identified the body that was eventually discovered as that of Marie Asu, 16, an Anaheim girl who had been missing since Jan. 8.

Before police found Asu by chance on Thursday afternoon, she lay naked in the dark garage for at least 10 days, authorities said.

In a strange way, it was not entirely a surprise to the neighborhood.

Some residents told Friday of having heard gossip for days. They heard the victim had been strangled. Others were informed she was shot. One man said it was a drugging.

“So many people hear so many different things you don’t know what to believe,” said Roxanne Padilla, 13, who said her older sister told her Monday about a body in a garage. Like others in the neighborhood who spoke Friday, Padilla said she did not check out the rumor.

Why?

“I don’t know,” she replied.

Another area resident, Steve Jones, 20, said he heard on Tuesday from somebody he wouldn’t identify that a girl had been strangled in one of the garages along East Grove Avenue. He said he decided not to get involved.

The story changed and evolved as it passed from person to person, but police “have not been able to find people to admit to seeing the body. Hopefully somebody will contact us,” said Lt. Trey Sirks of the Orange Police Department.

When the body was found, police said they believed some residents had seen it in the garage, but authorities weren’t sure of that Friday.

“I call it mind-boggling,” Detective Alex Varga said. “There seems to be an attitude permeating out there: ‘I don’t like to stick my neck out.’ I don’t understand why people know more but say less.”

The case involving the Richland Continuation High School student yielded much grist for the rumor mill, but few leads.

Orange police found Asu’s badly decomposed body in the unlocked, four-car garage. Police had been randomly checking for the missing girl in the gang-plagued neighborhood since Tuesday, when her aunt and guardian, Kalala Antonio, 45, heard she had been with friends in that area after she ran away from home once in December.

Asu returned home after running away the first time, but ran off again and was reported missing Jan. 8. Finally, she was found when police searched the neighborhood after Antonio reported rumors from classmates that Asu might be in trouble or hurt somewhere in that area.

Police said they did not know why Asu was naked. “We consider that very suspicious,” Sirks said. “That’s one of the things that keeps us guessing.”

Autopsy results Friday indicated Asu had been dead for at least 10 days. Police, who initially thought she’d been dead about three days, believe she died in a cot in the back of the garage. The garage is attached to a row of single-story apartment units on East Grove Avenue near Highland Street.

But police said they do not know how she died or whether she was murdered. To determine a cause of death, coroner officials will run toxicological tests, a process that could take three weeks, Sirks said.

Police said it’s hard to believe that no one knows anything reliable about Asu’s death, or that someone who may have entered the garage did not notice a dead person. “It’s difficult to say they didn’t but I can’t prove they did,” Varga said.

On Friday, residents in the apartments connected to the garages said they did not use the garage often and did not notice anything, not even a smell.

Investigators don’t understand why people might be reluctant to talk to them about the death. Maybe “people believe the police would try to stick them with something they did not do,” said an exasperated Varga.

Police have made no arrests.

But investigators want to question three men who residents say lived out of the garage for awhile in December.

Residents have identified the men only as Salvador, Enrique and Miguel. According to residents of the apartments connected to the garage, the men stayed in the garage for only a short time. Police do not know if someone allowed the three to stay there or if they moved in unannounced.

The men apparently disappeared in December.

On Friday, police unsealed the garage that had been Asu’s tomb. The inside was a jumble of trash, old clothes and sheets. Some car parts, tires and a mattress lined the walls. On one side was a broken-down four-door sedan.

In Anaheim, at the Kodiak Street apartment where Asu lived with her aunt since 1986, Antonio cried after talking with coroner officials. “I don’t know why they don’t do anything to contact the police,” Antonio said of people on East Grove Avenue.

Antonio and some family friends had launched a search for Asu after reporting her missing to Anaheim police. “If we (family members) did not do anything to look for her, she would still be there.”