The Feb. 17th Sunday News articles on the missing $35,000 in evidence from the Baltimore Court House the day before the early morning murder of Assistant U. S. Attorney Jonathan Luna misses the point:
Luna was murdered in Lancaster County. There is an abundance of evidence that the FBI was complicit in illegal activities that Luna knew about. Yet former District Attorney (and current County Judge) Donald Totaro declined to investigate the murder on his doorstep. (Click here for details.)
And so far there has been no indication that his elected successor, Craig Stedman, plans to re-open the investigation.
Totaro would defend his neglect of duty by claiming that the murder also falls in the jurisdiction of the FBI. But when hard evidence points to FBI involvement in improprieties about which Luna was charged by a judge to report upon the very next morning and when the FBI conducted a misinformation campaign after the murder, it was incumbent upon Totaro to investigate the matter. Any DA worth his or her salt would have leaped at the opportunity.
Now the Luna murder is likely to become the subject of a major motion picture. Totaro will properly be exposed as incompetent, or worse. And Lancaster County will be portrayed as a bunch of hicks who turned their backs on the murder of a young black justice department official.
Over the past two years, the Sunday News has reported commendably on the Luna matter, including editorializing about the brazen effort of the FBI to pressure the Lancaster County coroner to reclassify the homicide as suicide despite multiple stab wounds in Luna’s back.
Let’s hope that the Sunday News will now call for Stedman to conduct the investigation that Totaro refused to do, and which Luna and those who grieve for him and seek justice deserve.
