Police are denying reports that a 5-year-old girl was raped and then strangled to death with a jump rope on Sunday night in the Bronx.

The Daily News reported yesterday that Monet Williams was victimized while left alone in her grandmother’s apartment in the Eastchester section of the Bronx. The report said the murderer hanged the young girl with a jump rope in a closet in the family’s seventh floor home after raping her.

Even while police are not ruling out foul play in the young girl’s death, detectives believe the young girl may have strangled herself while attempting to use the jump rope as a trapeze, police sources said.

Friends and neighbors of the family, who gathered by a memorial of pictures, balloons, and candles set up outside the family’s apartment building yesterday, castigated the press and police for spreading what they called lies about the family and the cause of the young girl’s death.

“Somebody should clear this, she died from asphyxiation,” a friend of the Williams’s who had spoken with family members minutes earlier, Paulette Young, said. “She was a good parent, a churchgoing one.”

Police were notified about the young girl’s death when her grandmother placed a 911 call at about 5:30 p.m. on Sunday. When they arrived at the apartment, Williams was unconscious on a couch, police sources said. Her grandmother said she had untied the girl from the jump rope that was still hanging from a door stop on the outside of a closet, police sources said.

Along with her grandmother, Williams, a kindergarten student at P.S. 153, lived in a four-bedroom apartment with her mother, Jackie Williams, her aunt, Joyce Williams, and several cousins, neighbors said.

Ms. Young’s daughter, Tianna Colon, 7, spoke to reporters yesterday about the death of her friend; reminiscing about how the two enjoyed playing with her puppy, a red nose pit bull named Brazil.

“I was really sad because I lost my best friend,” she said.

A neighbor in an apartment steps from the Williams’s family home, who was in the apartment all day on Sunday, Ana Sabatera, 70, was surprised when she learned that the young girl was allegedly murdered because she heard no signs of a struggle.

“I didn’t hear anything,” she said. “I found out through the News.”