Lancaster County judge orders the unsealing of federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna’s autopsy records

• By Jade Campos / LNP | LancasterOnline

A Lancaster County judge on Monday signed an order unsealing autopsy records in the 2003 death of federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna, whose body was found face-down in a creek in Brecknock Township. The move comes after a yearslong effort by LNP | LancasterOnline to obtain information that could provide more insight into Luna’s mysterious death.

Judge David Ashworth signed off on a motion by the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office to vacate the seal originally put in place in 2020. At the time, the DA’s office said releasing the records could jeopardize the investigation into Luna’s death.

“It’s a win for the public, because these are otherwise public records,” said Paula Knudsen Burke, the Pennsylvania staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press who represented LNP | LancasterOnline.

The county coroner’s office in East Hempfield Township did not allow a reporter access to the building immediately following the hearing, and an employee, who did not provide a name, said through the building intercom that Luna’s records could not be viewed at that time.

Anyone who wants the records, the employee said, would have to file a records request to receive the files, acknowledging having received LNP | LancasterOnline’s request for the records on Friday through the coroner’s office’s standard request form.

Tom Murse, LNP | LancasterOnline’s executive editor, filed a formal Right to Know request Monday.

The body of Luna, a 38-year-old Baltimore prosecutor, was discovered Dec. 4, 2003, with 36 stab wounds and face-down in a small creek on the property of a Brecknock Township well drilling company. Officials formally determined Luna died by freshwater drowning, though investigators continue to disagree about how he died.

The case reains an open homicide in Pennsylvania under the jurisdiction of the Pennsylvania State Police and the DA’s office. However, federal investigators in Baltimore have suggested through anonymous sources that personal troubles may have led Luna to take his own life, either intentionally or accidentally.

The autopsy records had been considered lost until they were rediscovered in county archives in January 2020. LNP | LancasterOnline requested that the records be released; the request was denied by Ashworth in 2021, who sided with the DA’s office.

At the October 2020 hearing before Ashworth, testimony revealed that the FBI considered Luna’s case active, despite years earlier telling The Washington Post that it had been “administratively closed.”

State Trooper Chad Roberts, who heads the Lancaster County area’s criminal investigations unit for homicides, missing persons and cold cases, testified at the hearing that he examines the case annually.

LNP | LancasterOnline renewed its request for the autopsy records in November 2024, citing continued public interest in the case. Luna’s death was the inspiration for a documentary called “The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna,” which was shown at The Red Rose Film Festival in 2024 and is based on a 2004 book of the same title. Multiple podcasts have also studied the Luna case.