Authorities Hunt Killer Who Set Mississippi Teen on Fire

Authorities in Mississippi were searching a cell phone found near a teen who was set on fire and burned to death in a grisly murder, as they looked for clues that could lead to her killer, local media reported Wednesday.

Jessica Chambers, 19, was last seen at a gas station Saturday night around 6:30 pm. She was found alive, and on fire, about 90 minutes later on a rural road in Panola County. She died at a hospital in Memphis; no arrests have been made in the case, according to The Clarion-Ledger.

Her death was being investigated as a homicide and the initial autopsy shows she died from burns covering 98 percent of her body, the newspaper reported.

Calls placed to the local district attorney and the sheriff's office seeking an update on the investigation weren't immediately returned.

Chief Cole Haley of the Courtland Fire Department said they first came upon the scene of a burning car and thought it was fairly routine.

'We were expecting it to be a normal car fire,' he told NBC affiliate WMC. He told his team, 'Put it out, extinguish it, be done with it.'

But to then he saw Chambers lying next to her burning car. She whispered some words to him, but he couldn't disclose those utterances at this time, according to the station. 'I realized who the victim was and it was just shocking,' he said.

Investigators told WMC that it appeared someone poured an accelerant on the teen before setting her on fire.

Ben Chambers, Jessica's father, said what happened to his daughter was incomprehensible. 'Only part of her body that wasn't burnt was the bottom of her feet. ... I want to see justice for this so bad,' he told NBC affiliate WMC. 'Why? What did she do? What kind of monster are you? ... That's a part of me that's gone forever.'

Her sister, Amanda Prince, said Chambers was a cheerleader who was 'really well know, she was loved.' Prine set up a Facebook page in a bid to help investigators solve her sister's murder. 'Nineteen years old. I don't know how you come back from that,' Prince told NBC affiliate KTSM. 'I haven't seen her since July and now I'll never see her again.'

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First published December 10 2014, 3:02 PM

Miranda Leitsinger

Miranda Leitsinger is a reporter at NBC News. She started this role in February 2011. Leitsinger is responsible for long-term enterprise and breaking news coverage. Her beats include recovery from natural disasters and mass shootings, the LGBT community, income inequality, immigration and the Boy Scouts. Leitsinger previously worked at CNN.com in Hong Kong as a digital producer, where she collaborated with the network's television staff in Asia to produce enterprise stories for the website. Before that she worked as a reporter at for seven years in various cities, including New York, Miami, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Bangkok, Thailand, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. She covered the aftermath of 9/11 in Florida, the 2004 tsunami in Asia, the initial military tribunal at Guantanamo and Cambodia's bid to recover from genocide and the ensuing decades of civil war.Leitsinger, a San Francisco native, lives in New York.

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