Prosecutor's mysterious death still unsolved

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

BALTIMORE - He'd come so far to end up sprawled face-down in a creek in rural Lancaster, Penn., drowned, with 36 shallow stab wounds on his clothed body. The death of Jonathan Luna -- 38 years old, husband, devoted father of two small children -- was and is a perplexing mystery. He was a hard-working lawyer, mourned by his colleagues at the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore.

“He served this office, he served the community, and the interest of justice with great dedication and commitment,” said Mr. Thomas Dibiagio, U.S. attorney for the district of Maryland.

As an assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore, Luna put away dozens of bad guys -- sexual predators, drug dealers, and before that, in Brooklyn, N.Y, as a young assistant district attorney. It wasn't hard to imagine someone from the prosecutor's professional past getting even. Or was it something else entirely that could explain how a young man from some of the tougher streets of New York wound up dead in the middle of the night in a creek in Amish country?

Mr. Reggie Shuford: The brutality of his murder is directly opposite to the gentle way that he lived his life.

The long line of those who speak well of Jonathan Luna forms behind his close friend and one-time law school roommate at the University of North Carolina, Reggie Shuford. He talked to us shortly after Luna’s death.

Mr. Shuford: He was an easy-going person. Anyone could get along with Jonathan.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline NBC: Since his death, some adjectives have become attached to him. Selfless ...

Mr. Shuford: Right.

Murphy: ...compassionate...

Mr. Shuford: Absolutely.

Murphy: ...charismatic....

Mr. Shuford: Absolutely. Charming, gregarious, gentle, you name it.

Luna grew up in New York, in a rough and tumble neighborhood in the south Bronx. It’s a neighborhood he was never ashamed of, but he'd decided early on he wanted to break away from.

Daniel Rivera: We would look out the window and you could see people literally lined up buying drugs right in the open.

Daniel Rivera was his friend from the projects.

Rivera: Early on, he knew, you know, this is not where I want to end up. I have to study, work hard and get to another place in my life.

Education and determination were his ticket out: first Fordham University, then the law school at UNC.

And when he graduated and passed the bar, no one was surprised when his idealism took him to the Brooklyn district attorney's office. By then he was married to a doctor. It was a blind date that worked out.

Mr. Shuford: He was very, very proud of his wife, who was an accomplished professional person in her own right.

In 1999, Luna applied for a position as an assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore. Judge Lynne Battaglia, then Maryland’s U.S. attorney, interviewed Jonathan. He beat out thousands of other candidates.

Judge Battaglia: He had come from very basic roots. And had learned the hard way that people needed to live in safe communities and do the right thing. And in the end that would make all the difference.

And Luna was making a difference, tackling cases like the one he was wrapping up in the federal courthouse on the evening of Dec. 3, 2003 -- a drug case against two co-defendants. Reporter Gail Gibson had been covering the routine day in court, and remembers Luna had told her not to be late the next morning.

Gail Gibson: He said to me, you know, "You'll want to be here on time. We're finishing this thing up tomorrow."

Luna reportedly went home that night, but then returned to the office to finish working out the plea agreement, which would be presented to the judge the following morning. At 11:30 p.m., when he left the courthouse, he was under no apparent duress.

But six hours later, off a country road in rural Pennsylvania, roughly a hundred miles from the Baltimore courthouse, a man working on the property spied a red light in the distance and went over to check it out. He told his co-workers what he discovered.

“And he realized it was a car,” said one woman. “And when he saw the blood on the outside of the door he said, in his mind it was an injury accident, so he called 911. And then the police came.”

The police discovered the body face-down in the creek just a few feet away from the still-idling car, the victim wearing a business suit.

Newspapers reported the grisly findings: three dozen stab wounds about the neck and chest made with something like a pen knife, blood in the car, the victim's ID still on him.

Later that morning, in Baltimore, few were aware that Luna was even missing. Federal court convened at 9:30 am in the case of the two accused drug dealers, and there was no prosecutor.

Gail Gibson: As the morning went on, you know, there was a real sense of dread in the courtroom because I don't think anybody sitting in there felt like this was going to end well.

In New York, Luna’s friends heard the first headlines that Jonathan was missing.

Rivera: I was just hysterical. Hysterical.

Mr. Shuford: Within a matter of seconds, I called his home and spoke with his mother-in-law, who told me that the authorities were there and that they had just provided the news that they had found his body that morning. It was very difficult.

Targeting a federal prosecutor is statistically rare. Still, after the shock came the inevitable fear. Was Jonathan’s death work-related? Had someone he once prosecuted come back for revenge?

The search for justice has taken as twisted and baffling a path as the one Jonathan Luna followed on that last night of his life.

Reuland: And one of the reasons why I can't let this case go, I can't stop thinking about it, is not just that it was my friend, but because none of it makes sense. None of it fits together in any rational, coherent fashion.

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