By Nicole Bode
DNAinfo Associate Editor
MANHATTAN — The body of an 8-year-old autistic boy allegedly murdered by his mother in a Fifth Avenue luxury hotel last week has been retrieved after four days at the city morgue, officials confirmed Tuesday.
Representatives from the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home picked up Jude Michael Mirra, who was found dead last Friday on the bed of the Peninsula Hotel in Midtown, around 1 p.m. on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the city's medical examiner said.
The boy’s mother, Gigi Jordan, is currently being held at Elmhurst Hospital Center awaiting arraignment on charges she murdered him with an overdose of drugs before trying unsuccessfully to kill herself.
Police found Jordan unconscious on the floor beside her son’s bed when they broke down the door to the murder scene, police sources said.
Jordan, 49, was surrounded by scattered pills and sheets of a partially-written suicide note, police sources said.
The boy’s body lay abandoned in the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner for days, until his biological father Emile Tzekov arrived from California to identify him Monday night, officials said. Tzekov had lost track of the boy years earlier, he told the Daily News.
The Upper East Side funeral home has handled a series of high-profile funeral services, including actor Heath Ledger, author Ayn Rand, and R&B singer Aaliyah.
The funeral home would not comment on the services, citing privacy requests from the family.
It was unclear whether the services would take place in New York or California. Tzekov initially told the News he would like to bring his child home to the West Coast for the funeral.
Those close to Jordan said the former pharmaceutical executive, who reportedly amassed millions and shared an apartment with her son in the Trump International Hotel & Towers on Columbus Circle, descended into madness while trying to care for her son alone.
Jordan had a bumpy road to pregnancy that culminated in Jude’s birth in 2001. Friends said once Jude was diagnosed with autism, Jordan threw herself into an impossible search for a cure — including treatments at hospitals and clinics around the country.
The pressure of that and two marriages that ended in divorce may have been enough to push the single mom over the edge, friends said.
Tzekov, a yoga teacher in Santa Barbara, CA, included a haunting message on his MySpace page weeks before the murder, in which he wrote, “Tantra believes in the inherent goodness of everything. Everything is holy, nothing is unholy and nothing is evil. For tantra there is no devil, only devine.(sic)”
