Family Finds Body of Missing Mother Jenna Lord

(July 19) -- The search for Jenna Lord ended in tragedy when a family search party found the body of the missing 23-year-old in a vacant lot in Camden, N.J.

"As soon as I moved the bushes, there was no mistaking," one of Lord's uncles, Kevin Fetrow, told The Philadelphia Inquirer after she was discovered Sunday. "She had on the same outfit, the bracelets, the shoes."

The family had been searching for the young woman, a mother of a 3-year-old boy, since she vanished over the Fourth of July weekend from a train station in Camden after attending a barbecue.

Her family members, unimpressed with the police investigation, organized a search on Facebook and took to the streets themselves. Sunday, a force of about 50 of her family and friends scoured Camden, desperate for signs of Jenna.

"Them cops didn't find nothing -- not a damn thing," Lord's grandfather, Vincent Caruso, told The Philadelphia Daily News.

From the beginning, the family had complained that police in Camden, Collingdale, Pa., and Collingswood, N.J., had been reluctant to search for Lord because of her rough past.

Lord was a drug addict, and she served a few weeks in jail for aggravated assault earlier this year. But in an interview with HLN's "Issues With Jane Velez-Mitchell" last week, her boyfriend said she was clean when she disappeared on July 5. And her aunt, Frenchie Caruso, said her trouble with the law doesn't make her niece's life less valuable.

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

There were multiple reports of confusion over jurisdiction in the case, but the three police departments had maintained that they were working together to find the missing woman. Friday, Collingdale Police Chief Robert Adams told AOL News that "everyone has been cooperating since the beginning." Camden police told The Philadelphia Daily News that they were helping the family search Sunday for Lord.

The woman's mother, Desiree Caruso, spoke to news outlets last week to plead for her daughter's safe return. She said last week that she knew something was wrong when Jenna didn't call home.

"It's not like Jenna not to call. No matter what, she always calls," Desiree Caruso told Philadelphia KYW 1060, a CBS affiliate, last week.

Sunday, the family's worst fears were confirmed when her uncles found a dead woman with a Mickey Mouse tattoo on her arm. That's how they knew it was Jenna, her family told reporters.

The body appeared burned and had decomposed in the intense heat. Police said an autopsy will be performed today to confirm that the body is Lord's, according to the Inquirer.

It's unclear how Lord, who was from Collingdale, Pa., ended up dead in an area of Camden known for rampant drug use and violence. But another uncle, Ariel Morales, said he's sure his niece wasn't looking for a hit.

"She's not going to come out here to do drugs," Morales told the Daily News. "She knows Philly really, really good so she didn't have to come to Camden to find drugs, and even at her worse, she never goes without calling."

Her aunt, Kimmy McArdle, said the family was "devastated" by the news. "We just didn't want to believe it," she told NBC Philadelphia.

Surveillance video of the train station in Camden where Lord was last seen shows her being followed by two men. Police have made no arrests. Lord's family could not immediately be reached for comment this morning. Calls to the Camden Police Department were not immediately returned today.