Investigators Piece Together Slain Prosecutor’s Strange Last Night

Jonathan P. Luna’s puzzling, roundabout last journey started with a late-night call at his suburban home.

The assistant U.S. attorney quickly left and headed to his office at the federal court building in Baltimore, 10 miles away, his father said.

Officials will not say who called the 38-year-old prosecutor the night of Dec. 4, just hours before he was found stabbed 36 times and drowned in a creek in Pennsylvania, 70 miles away.

Investigators are still piecing together details of that night using electronic toll and credit card receipts, surveillance videos and interviews with workers at highway rest stops.

Luna had traveled to the Philadelphia area several times recently, said his father, Paul Luna. He even canceled a Thanksgiving weekend trip to New York City, telling his father: “I have a case. I have to go to Pennsylvania.”

But officials said he had no court business in Pennsylvania.

The prosecutor’s body was found a few miles from Denver, Pa., in Lancaster County just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

If Luna had wanted to drive to that area directly, two highway routes would have taken him there in just over an hour.

Instead, he took Interstate 95 from Baltimore northeastward into Delaware and toward the Philadelphia area, a route that would add more than an hour to the drive if Lancaster County was his destination.

According to courthouse records, Luna left his office about 11:30 p.m. He left several personal items behind, a law enforcement official said, suggesting he either left in a rush or planned to return.

Luna’s first known stop was a rest stop in Newark, Del. Employees say Luna withdrew money from an ATM there.

Luna apparently continued north into the Philadelphia area and onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Investigators have not made it clear where he entered the toll road.

Luna may have pulled into a rest stop along the turnpike in King of Prussia, Pa., on the northwest side of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Employees at a Sunoco station there said he arrived sometime after 3 a.m. and bought a soda, a snack and gasoline.

Assistant manager Sham Vaid said Luna put two tanks of gas on his credit card. But after interviewing employees and reviewing surveillance video and cash register receipts, investigators do not believe there was a second car traveling with Luna.

A Roy Rogers restaurant manager at a rest stop at Elverson, 30 miles away, says she, too, saw Luna, sometime before 3:30 a.m.

Kathy Seidel did not notice whether he was with anyone.

Elverson is 20 miles and two exits from the Reading-Lancaster Turnpike exit in Lancaster County, just a few miles from where Luna was killed.

Luna was found facedown in the creek, and money was left scattered in the car.