The Case He Left Behind

By David Van Biema Sunday, Dec. 07, 2003
    • There is nothing quite so heart wrenching and at the same time inspiring as a man who loses his life while protecting those of others. Jonathan Luna had seemed such a man. An assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore, Luna, 38, had spent weeks on a high-profile prosecution of two violent local heroin dealers. The case went to trial, but last Wednesday the defendants opted to plea bargain. Luna and their lawyers spent the day hashing out a plea to be finalized Thursday morning. Yet when morning arrived, Luna was not in court. Soon the whole nation knew why. Four hours earlier, 90 miles north in a part of Pennsylvania's Lancaster County more familiar with Amish horses and buggies than homicide, a silver Honda Accord had been found idling but empty, its nose dipped in a small creek. Yards away was a body. The victim, federal law-enforcement sources say, had been severely beaten and stabbed 36 times. That, however, did not kill him. He apparently drowned. The corpse was Jonathan Luna's.

    The murder sent shock waves through multiple communities. Luna left a wife and two young sons. He had made good friends at every stop on his Horatio Alger — style rise from his South Bronx youth to law school to a fine clerkship to his last, prestigious post. Reggie Shuford, a former roommate, offered typically lavish praise: "He was just the nicest guy you would want to meet — sincere, compassionate, charismatic, engaging, interested, interesting, devoted to his family and friends, loyal to them, hardworking, intelligent, charming, straightforward. He was as good as they come." Vowed Luna's boss, U.S. Attorney Thomas DiBiagio: "We will find out who did this. That's a commitment from every law-enforcement officer in the state of Maryland."


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    But some of those officers soon discovered anomalies suggesting that neither the crime nor Luna may have been exactly what they had at first seemed. Suspicion had originally settled on the jailed drug dealers. But they lacked a motive: the plea had shaved years from their expected sentences, and shooting its architect could only jeopardize that. Then there was Luna's last trip. After his car clocked out of the courthouse garage at 11:40 p.m. on Wednesday, his route to Pennsylvania was not that of a man driving at gunpoint or of thugs with a prisoner in the trunk. It was oddly circuitous and left a clear electronic trail. Automatic-toll charges, an ATM record and a gas receipt suggest he drove northeast to the town of Newark, Del., then west and finally north into Lancaster County. The gas receipt also included charges for bottled water and soda, odd purchases during a gangland hit.

    The crime scene was equally perplexing. The Honda was strewn with money. Luna's ID was found on his body. His 36 stab wounds appeared to have been caused by a penknife-size instrument. Said a puzzled veteran federal investigator: "A professional rubout, they'd put one in the back of your head and dump you in the harbor. There's something else going on here we don't see."

    Glimmers of what that might be emerged late in the week. An FBI examination of Internet postings turned up messages on adult sites placed by a Jonathan Luna seeking female sex partners. Someone else may have posted them (a much younger person also called Jonathan Luna is a convicted sex offender). But TIME located two Internet personals that are dated 1997, conform to the prosecutor's age and marital status, and are signed with his three initials backward. Investigators have also found that Luna had debt problems, including credit cards that his wife had not known about.

    Now they are considering the theory that Luna may have known his killer and that they had taken a casual drive before things went horribly wrong. Is that the only possibility? Hardly. A successful prosecutor always makes enemies. But the new information lends poignancy to an observation by Baltimore U.S. District Judge Andre Davis. Luna, he said, was the rare prosecutor who understood "that there's no such thing as good guys and bad guys but that there are good guys who do bad things. It's complicated, and he didn't try to uncomplicate it." His former colleagues are now trying to uncomplicate his death.