How irresponsible reporting makes an excruciating crime more painful.

A little girl is found dead in a recycling bin, just about 24 hours after she goes missing outside the Santa Cruz artists’ residences where she lives part of the time with her mother. We know details of the clothing she wore (a purple dress, black leggings and a black helmet) and what she was doing (riding her white Razor scooter and waiting for one of her best friends to show up so they could play together) before she disappeared on a hot Sunday afternoon. We know snippets about her personality – a neighbor describes her as a loud, ebullient little girl – and nobody believes she would have wandered off.

A teenage boy who lives in the same affordable complex for members of Santa Cruz’s creative class is arrested a short time after the body is found, and police say he is a suspect in the girl’s death. He allegedly lured her to his apartment, raped and strangled her, then dumped her body in the trash.

I’m now wondering why the Santa Cruz Sentinel (and, because they are papers in the same dysfunctional family) the Monterey County Herald and the San Jose Mercury News all ran online stories on Sunday that offered up nuggets of dirt about the little girl’s mother, stepmother and father, why they did it without any analysis about what those facts mean and why it appears they failed to give those family members an opportunity to respond before the story went live.

These are the questions that kept me up for hours after KRON-TV broke the news Monday night that the girl’s body had been found. The troubling online story, which originated with the Sentinel, included snippets of various family members’ criminal and civil court histories. I won’t rehash any of it here, because doing so would be giving credence to that reporting. But suffice it to say, clearly these people aren’t a real-life version of the fictionalized Walton family. Then again, neither is anyone who’s reading this.

The difference between most everyone reading this and the family is that most everyone hasn’t had a child taken from them and murdered.

It’s not clear to me when the online story was posted, whether it was before or after the girl’s body was found, because no clarification or note of changes had been appended to the piece. It’s clear, though, that the story was cleaned up after her body was found.

We didn’t cover the story because it happened in Santa Cruz. Still, when an exasperated source asked me to read the piece and give him my opinion, I mused on Twitter that I would have kept the vicious familial dirt on the dead girl’s family for the day-two story.

It was a sarcastic shot across the bow, and Jason Hoppin, an editor at the Herald and someone I consider a good, competitive journalist, fired back. He asked if I would have sat on information about a previous arrest involving the father. I asked if the man had been convicted, and Hoppin said no. Then he asked again if I would have sat on the information.

I’ve thought about it a lot. And yes, I would have sat on the information. I would have sat on it long enough to track down the family members whose lives I was splaying open and ask for their side. I would have sat on it long enough to get a police official or prosecutor or the father’s attorney to put that arrest into some sort of context. If the police said they had ruled out family members as suspects early enough in the process, I would have sat on it for good.

As one commenter on the Sentinel’s Facebook page put it, they crucified the parents.

It’s not just me. I checked in with a few colleagues. Most notably, Royal Calkins, former Herald editor, said he wouldn’t have reported family dirt unless there were real indications they were suspects.

There’s a code of ethics in journalism (I know, it’s often hard to believe) written by the Society of Professional Journalists that says, among other things, that reporters and editors should show compassion to those affected by news coverage. I think with the dirt that has since been scrubbed from the website, the Sentinel and its sister papers missed the mark.

Mary Duan is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan