Two days after a search party of family and friends found 23-year-old Jenna Lord’s body in a Camden lot, family members say that there is one man who may be able to answer the long list of questions surrounding the young mother’s death.
The man who may have the answers is the same man who told the search party to look in the vacant lot at 5th and Ramona Gonzalez streets, family members told the Daily News.
Once Lord’s badly decomposed body was spotted by family Sunday afternoon and the wailing shrieks ensued, the man ran away, reports the Daily News. Family and friends chased the man, and Edward Steele, the father of Lord’s 3-year-old son, punched him repeatedly until police took the unnamed man away in a patrol car.
Law-enforcement sources told the Daily News that the man admitted to doing drugs with Lord in the empty lot where she was found dead. He said that he and Lord did drugs together the same day she was seen getting off a train in Camden with the man and another white male – July 5 – the day Lord went missing.
The man told police that he left Lord in the vacant lot after she passed out, sources told the Daily News.
"I think he's a piece of crap," Kimmy McCardle, Lord's aunt, told the Daily News. "I absolutely think foul play was involved. We need to know how she died."
Lord disappeared after she was dropped off at a PATCO station in Camden the morning after a family Fourth of July barbecue. Two weeks later her family found her and Monday’s autopsy report was inconclusive because the Delaware County mother’s body was extremely decomposed.
"It is unclear exactly when Lord died, though when her body was found she was wearing the same clothes as she was seen wearing on July 5, the day she was reported missing," officials said in a statement.
The extreme heat and rain in the past two weeks contributed to the quick and extreme decomposition of Lord’s body. If the body had been found sooner, the medical examiner could have run toxicology tests.
"If he knew she was there," Collingdale Police Chief Robert Adams told the Daily News, "why didn't he call us?"
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