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FAMILY’S FURY

A furious Bronx family is reeling at the apparently botched investigation into their teenage daughter’s brutal rape, murder and misidentification.

“They’re really distraught right now,” family friend and neighbor Marcus Thomas, 27, said today. “The police messed this up, they really compromised the investigation. It took them two months to make that apartment a crime scene, that’s uncalled for.

“It took them so long to find information that was right under their nose.”

Tiana Rice, 16, was never a problem child, Thomas said.

“She was never a street urchin, she had a good heart,” he said.

But Rice apparently got more than she bargained for when she left her home Dec. 30, telling her mother she was going to meet a friend when, sources said, she was actually going to meet a man she met on the Internet.

Realizing Rice had never arrived at her friend’s house, her family began a frantic search.

But it would be more than a month before they found out what happened to Tiana, whose lifeless body was initially misidentified by police as an adult woman, the city Medical Examiner’s office said.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said. “When she was reported to us by the police we were given a name and an age.”

Rice’s naked body was found Dec. 30 on the second floor of an abandoned Brooklyn building, just hours after she left her home.

By 10:41 p.m. that night, an anonymous 911 call from a pay phone a few doors away from the crime scene on Ridegwood Avenue in Brooklyn. The caller reported a woman having an asthma attack at 268 Ridgewood Ave., sources said.

By the time EMS workers arrived, they found Rice lying face up, already dead, sources said.

The teen met the man at the subway before going to the abandoned building with him, sources said, and the couple was at some point joined by two other men.

The men, whom police have identified, claim the teen had consensual sex with two of them before she was raped. One of the men then apparently held Rice down while the other sexually attacked her, triggering the asthma attack and cardiac arrest that lead to her death, authorities said.

Police initially misidentified the 16-year-old’s body using the driver’s license of an adult woman that was found near the body.

A medical examiner’s investigator eventually determined the woman from the driver’s license was alive, authorities said. An anthropologist in the medical examiner’s office then realized Rice’s body was that of a teen.

Her family positively identified Rice in early February, and the case was reclassified as a homicide last week after the medical examiner’s office determined Rice died of an asthma attack and cardiac arrest brought on “during forced sexual intercourse,” authorities said.