'She was my best friend,' Jenna Burleigh's brother tells mourners

"She was strong, she was beautiful, she was powerful, she was my best friend," Jeb Burleigh told several hundred mourners Friday. He and  older sister Jenna argued about politics and art. She caught him kissing a girl in a hallway once and teased him.

"Jenna, Jenna, Jenna, such a pretty name. It carries weight," he said in a soft voice at the Funeral Mass for his 22-year-old sister at St. Maria Goretti Roman Catholic Church in Hatfield.

Photos of Jenna Burleigh, always smiling, greeted visitors in the lobby. The second oldest of four siblings, the Temple University transfer student, who was slain more than a week ago, was known for her outspoken progressive views.

Msgr. Joseph McLoone, pastor at St. Joseph Parish in Downingtown, who knows the family and was asked to give the homily, told the mourners sitting in red-cushioned wooden pews that Burleigh's story was one of "a child who thought she was an adult"; someone who could make you cry but could also make you the happiest person in the world; someone who liked to write, read, and make videos; who loved Philadelphia; and who "brought home a dog with no one's permission."

McLoone said in an interview that he knew Jenna's father from when Ed Burleigh was the nursing home administrator at St. Martha Manor in Downingtown, near McLoone's church. The Rev. Andrew Brownholtz, the former pastor of St. Maria Goretti and now pastor of St. Ignatius in Yardley, was asked to be the celebrant at the Funeral Mass because the family knows him well, said McLoone.

During the hourlong service, many wiped away tears. At least a dozen young women wore headbands with cat ears on top — Burleigh used to wear such headbands, friends said. And friends hugged, remembering the beautiful young woman whose life of promise was cut short.

Burleigh, of Harleysville, Montgomery County, had just started her first week of classes as a commuter student at Temple when she was slain Aug. 31, allegedly by a former Temple student, Joshua Hupperterz, in his North Philadelphia apartment.

Hupperterz, 29, was arrested and charged last weekend with murder, abuse of corpse, and related offenses. Police have said that the two met at Pub Webb, a bar on Cecil B. Moore Avenue, and that he then killed her in his nearby apartment on 16th Street. Later, her remains were brought in a storage container to the Jenkintown home of Hupperterz's mother.

Hupperterz allegedly then rode in a Lyft car with the container to his grandmother's house in Hawley, Wayne County, in northeastern Pennsylvania. Police found her body last Saturday in a shed at the grandmother's home, about 140 miles from Philadelphia. The Wayne County coroner ruled Sunday that Burleigh died from blunt trauma and strangulation.

But Friday was a day for celebrating Burleigh's life.

"She was super-unapologetically herself. She always brought a smile to the room," James Brownback, 23, a coworker and friend, said after the service.

Burleigh began working part-time in February as a sales associate at a Plato's Closet store in Montgomeryville, said Brownback, the clothing store's floor manager. "She was sunshine on a cloudy day," he said.

Molly Mohseni, a longtime friend of the family, said Burleigh "was a beautiful, beautiful good-hearted kid. She was the most beautiful young lady you got to know."

"She was taken away from all of us," said Mohseni.