Emmitt Till revisited

'It looked like he'd been beaten'

Posted March 22, 2006 -- Witnesses say the body of slain federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna exhibited signs of Luna having attempted to fend off a vicious attack, and having been beaten, before his brutal murder in December, 2003.

	Luna on his wedding day (top); below, friend Dan Rivera describes fatal wound, and takes issue with claim that Luna suffered an 'accidental prick'

In his casket, Luna's hands were covered with gloves, obscuring wounds on his hands that seemed consistent with a desperate attempt to defend himself, while his lips and face appeared pummeled and battered.

"The person who worked in the funeral (home) said the reason (Luna's body) was wearing gloves was that his hands were really cut up," Luna's lifelong friend, Dan Rivera, says in a forthcoming documentary about Luna's life and death.

"I guess (his hands) must have been really mutilated and I guess they didn't want people to see that and to get upset," Rivera relates. "They just wanted us to understand why he had on gloves. Obviously, when you go to a funeral, you don't expect to see somebody with gloves."

"So your understanding of that was that these were defensive wounds?" Rivera was asked.

"Yeah, exactly, exactly," Rivera says. "Like I said, his lips were really swollen. It was almost as if he was punched in the face repeatedly.... It definitely looked like he was beaten up. And he had a big gash that was visible on the side of his neck. And I was really upset. I was hysterical because you could see he looked like he had been beat up. Just to see your friend in that condition--."

"There was this really horrible Washington Post article that came out in December, 2005 where they say, '(Luna) was trying to gain sympathy, and ... he was just "pricking himself, and accidentally nicked an artery," when the coroner says that the knife went all the way through the neck, and almost came out, or came out, the other side--. That's closer to your recollection?" Rivera is asked in the interview. "This isn't somebody just 'pricking himself?'"

"No, it's not a prick," Rivera recalls. "You could see it was a pretty deep gash, and it was actually bigger (than what viewers at the funeral home could see) because the collar -- you know they were trying to cover it up -- the collar was up pretty high. But you could still see that the gash, I mean, it was probably longer than what I saw, obviously it was, because the collar was covering it, but you could still see it was a pretty deep wound. It wasn't a 'prick,' I can tell you that much."

The Lancaster County, Pennsylvania coroner ruled Luna's death a homicide. At the time of his death, Luna was questioning the legality of a plea deal which served to protect the badly mismanaged Baltimore FBI field office, administered by FBI agents-in-charge Gary Bald and Jennifer Smith Love, and their underlings. Bald and Love remain top "anti-terrorism" officials with the FBI. The FBI, through a badly compromised Washington Post, has been leaking the absurd "accidental prick" theory of Luna's death.

The Lancaster County coroner's office in late 2004 was visited by FBI agents who unsuccessfully attempted to pressure the coroner into changing the ruling of Luna's death from homicide to that of suicide.

 

Watch the interview mentioned in this article in:

Quicktime 7 (H264)  |   Windows Media