On the Sixth Anniversary of Jonathan Luna's Mysterious Death, Still No Arrest
How did a young federal prosecutor from Baltimore end up dead in the Pa. woods?
Dec. 4, 2009 — -- On Dec. 4, 2003, a worker arriving for an early morning shift at a drilling company in rural Pennsylvania found a Honda with Maryland plates with its motor running. Face down in a stream next to the car was Jonathan Luna, 38, an assistant United States Attorney from Baltimore. He had died from drowning, but the inside of the car was smeared with blood and investigators would later find 36 stab wounds on his body.
Six years later, the mystery of how Luna, who through willpower and intellect had risen from a South Bronx housing project to become a federal prosecutor, died in the Pennsylvania woods remains unsolved. Who was driving Luna's silver Accord, which still had a baby seat in the back, the night of Dec. 3? Why was there money strewn around its back seat?
Friends, who universally described Luna as a gentle, upstanding family man in press accounts after his death, remain upset that no one has yet been charged with his murder.
"He was an incredibly kind guy," said New York attorney Robert Reuland, who once worked with Luna at the Brooklyn District Attorney's office. "The fact that five years has gone by and there have been no developments is incredibly frustrating."
"No objective person looking at this investigation can say it was the best we can do," continued Reuland. "When someone devotes their career to this kind of job, you expect to be protected first of all, but God forbid you're murdered and they don't do anything."
The investigation was conducted jointly by the FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police. Special Agent Richard Wolf of the FBI's Baltimore office said the Luna case is "not closed," but declined further comment. Lt. Myra Taylor of the Pennsylvania State Police said that for her agency, "It is very much an active investigation." The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania is reportedly conducting an investigation into Luna's death, but spokesperson Patricia Hartman declined to comment.
Despite Reuland's insistence that his friend was murdered, there are conflicting theories about how Luna wound up dead. Those who think he was murdered wonder if he was killed by someone connected to a case he had handled. Among the defendants Luna prosecuted were drug dealers and sex offenders. An alternate explanation says that Luna committed suicide and made it look like murder, perhaps because of problems at work.
What is known is that on Dec. 3, 2003, Luna was concluding a case against two drug dealers. He told an associate he expected to wrap it up the next day. The case was not going well, because a crucial witness, a government informant, had changed his testimony.
At 11:38 p.m., Luna's car left the office garage. His cell phone and eyeglasses were still on his desktop. He did not return home to his wife and two children. Instead, his car traveled northeast on Interstate 95, and whoever was driving it used Luna's EZ-Pass pass to pay tolls in Maryland and Delaware.
Just before 1 a.m., $200 was withdrawn from his bank account at an ATM in Newark, Delaware. At around 4 a.m., his car exited the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The driver had used cash instead of the EZ-Pass to pay tolls on the New Jersey and Pennsylvania turnpikes.
At 5:30 a.m., his silver Accord was spotted with its front end in the stream on property of the Sensenig & Weaver Well Drilling Company in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. There was blood smeared on the exterior of the car. The police were called, and discovered Luna's body in the water. They also found money and a pool of blood in the back seat of the car.
The wounds on Luna's body, mostly around his chest and neck, were superficial and not sufficient to cause his death. They had been inflicted with his own pen knife. The actual cause of death was drowning.The Lancaster County Coroner ruled that Luna's death was a homicide.
But a year after his death, the FBI released a statement saying that Luna was alone from the time he left his office till he was discovered face down in the water. According to a 2005 Washington Post report, Luna was scheduled to take a polygraph test about $36,000 that had gone missing from drug case evidence. He also had $25,000 in credit card debt. The Post also reported that friends and associates said that Luna was worried about being fired from the U.S. Attorney's office. The anonymous investigators who spoke to the Post said the polygraph test pointed to suicide.
"He was murdered," said Luna's friend Rob Reuland. "Left face down in a creek and five years later, no one gives a s***."
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