Jackie Lugo, human-resources director for Modern Mushroom Farms Inc., said workers were mourning the loss of their colleague Daicy Vasquez-Bedolla.

About five miles away, the victim's mother, Hermila Bedolla Vasquez, sat solemnly in her Kennett Square apartment grieving for her only child. Surrounded by more than 25 friends and relatives, including some of her daughter's coworkers, she spoke through a translator.

"She'll never be forgotten," her mother said. "She was always very loving and very caring with her family and her friends."

Police found the 25-year-old's body Thursday during a search of a Cochranville dairy farm where Mauricio Jose Bedolla-Camacho, her former boyfriend, worked. Police said he had strangled her and concealed the body in a remote compost pile.

Bedolla-Camacho, who had been picked up by immigration authorities in Louisiana on Wednesday, has been charged with homicide and related offenses and was detained pending extradition to Pennsylvania, police said.

Vasquez-Bedolla failed to return home after working a shift from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. last Sunday, prompting her father, Jose Vasquez, to report her missing the next morning, Kennett Square Police Chief Edward Zunino said.

According to the criminal complaint, Bedolla-Camacho, the father of Vasquez-Bedolla's 3-year-old daughter, had called the victim's father the night before and said she was with him but would not let the father talk to her.

When investigative leads pointed outside the borough, state police and Chester County detectives joined the search, Zunino said.

Detectives traveled to New Orleans after officials there responded to an entry in the National Crime Information Center about the search for Bedolla-Camacho, who had been detained in an immigration check, police said.

The complaint said Bedolla-Camacho had told investigators that he and Vasquez-Bedolla argued at Knight Run Farm, where he worked, and that he began strangling her with red twine, had regrets, and stopped.

The victim then "verbally confronted him," and he became "enraged," tightening some black twine around her throat until she died, the complaint said.

It said Bedolla-Camacho had told troopers that he called the victim's father afterward because he wanted to forestall him from picking up his daughter. Bedolla-Camacho wanted to take the girl to Mexico, the complaint said.

Friends and relatives described the relationship between the two, which started in Mexico, as tumultuous.

Hermila Bedolla Vasquez, who has lived in Kennett Square with her husband for 10 years, said that initially relatives urged her daughter, who came to the United States in 2001, to end the off-and-on relationship.

"She didn't seem happy with him," Bedolla Vasquez said, adding that she had grudgingly accepted the relationship after her daughter insisted "that's what she wanted."

Vasquez-Bedolla had worked at Modern Mushroom in packaging since December but had quickly endeared herself to coworkers as "a pleasant person and good team player," Lugo said.

Lugo said she would visit the victim's family, taking food and helping with funeral arrangements. She said she expected colleagues to pitch in as well.

"That's what we're here for: to help them out," Lugo said of Vasquez-Bedolla's relatives. "We work here as a family, and she will be missed as a part of that family."

"It's a real tragedy," she said.