Family finds missing Delco woman dead in Camden

Jenna Lord disappeared after a Fourth of July barbecue.

On Sunday, after more than 50 family members and friends had mounted their own search across Camden, her uncle said he found her body in a vacant lot.

"As soon as I moved the bushes, there was no mistaking," said Kevin Fetrow, a construction worker from Southwest Philadelphia. "It wasn't nice."

He called over another searcher, who had a picture of Jenna taken July 4 on his cell phone.

"She had on the same outfit, the bracelets, the shoes," Fetrow said. "I just freaked out. I screamed."

A spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor's Office said Sunday he could not confirm that the body was that of the missing 23-year-old woman. An autopsy was scheduled for Monday morning to determine the cause of death and identity, said spokesman Jason Laughlin.

The mother of a 3-year-old boy, Lord had called her family early on July 5 from a train station in Camden. She never returned to her home in Collingdale, Delaware County.

Every day for two weeks, her mother, sister, and aunt left their homes in Philadelphia to venture into Camden to look for Lord.

Frustrated at the lack of progress, Lord's aunt, Frenchie Caruso, organized a search party on Facebook that scoured Camden for the missing woman on Sunday.

At 1:37 p.m., her uncle found her behind a stand of bushes in a vacant lot at Fifth and Division Streets.

According to Caruso, who had been searching the next block over with a Camden police escort, Lord's pocketbook had no cash or identification. "All that was left was the makeup."

For Lord's family, the two-week mystery has come to a decisive close.

Caruso said a tattoo on Lord's arm that read "Rest in Peace" was confirmation enough.

"It's Jenna. There's no doubt," said Caruso. "Our family said we were going to find her, and we went, and we found her."

Collingdale Police Chief Robert Adams said that the police search for Lord had been delayed by a question of jurisdiction. In Pennsylvania, he said, police in the town where the person goes missing lead the search. But in New Jersey, the search is headed by police where the missing person lives, Adams said.

Investigators, he added, were still trying to piece together Lord's final hours.

Adams said Lord was last seen at the holiday barbecue at her grandmother's South Jersey apartment complex in Collingswood.

Early the next morning, Lord left a message on her mother's voice mail using a phone belonging to a U.S. Marine.

"We still haven't been able to locate the Marine," Adams said.

Surveillance video captured images of Lord boarding a PATCO train to Philadelphia at the Walter Rand Transportation Center in Camden. She got off at the Gallery at Market East in Center City. Video taken in Philadelphia shows Lord talking to a woman and two men. Lord took what looked to be clothing from the woman and then boarded another train back to Camden, Adams said.

What was Lord doing in Camden?

"God knows," Adams said.

Frenchie Caruso said Collingdale police were slow to investigate her niece's disappearance seriously because Lord had been in trouble with the law.

Adams said Lord spent three weeks in Delaware County prison in June, and was facing a preliminary hearing July 6 on charges of aggravated assault and robbery.

"That shouldn't matter," Caruso said. "Everybody deserves a future. . . . It doesn't matter who they are. Everybody counts."