Recently, Hugh Murray visited the United States from Iraq, where he is an attorney for the U.S. Army, to attend the funeral of his sister, Bethesda Row Lululemon slaying victim Jayna Murray. Waiting for him when he returned to Iraq was the last gift he’d ever receive from his sister.
Jayna Murray mailed a package to her brother just a few days before her death, Bethesda Patch reported.
When in town for the funeral, Hugh Murray learned from a friend of his sister that Jayna Murray had bought a card for him. Hugh Murray did not know whether or not she’d sent it.
Murray, who travels frequently within Iraq for his job, called and emailed around to see if he had any mail waiting for him when he returned to Iraq. He came up empty-handed. But he had also given Jayna and his family another address in Mosul, where he occasionally travels. He was finally able to confirm he had two packages waiting for him there, and when he recently made his way back north to the city, he discovered one of them was from Jayna.
Inside, he found the card and a Lululemon running hat, he told Patch.
"I really enjoy distance running and before I left, it had been really cold up north [in Iraq.] Every morning I would wake up and there would be frost on the ground. I was complaining to Jayna that I didn’t have warm head gear to wear running, and ironically enough, she sent me a Lululemon running cap," Murray said.
He also found a card. It was illustrated with images of items that pair together, captioned with words such as, "peanut butter without jelly" and "chips without dip."
"There were five or six things, and at the bottom it said something like, 'me without you,'" Murray said.
Hugh Murray told Patch that while the package reaffirms his relationship with his sister, it also made him feel her loss even more.
Jayna Murray’s coworker, 28-year-old Brittany Norwood, is suspected in the homicide. The victim apparently caught Norwood stealing from the store, prompting Norwood to call the victim back to the store after closing on March 11. Norwood is accused of attacking Jayna Murray with some object inside the store and then inflicting superficial wounds on herself to make it look like she was a victim, too.
