Jennifer Lingard’s family breaks silence to remember mother, marine

Over $45,000 has been raised in a GoFundMe to support her two young children.

REHOBOTH, Mass. (WLNE) — Exactly one month after the tragic death of Jennifer Lingard, family members are speaking out to honor her legacy.

“She is-and I don’t say was, she is a marine. She’s a blackbelt. She’s an R.N. at Landmark Medical Center in the labor room. Everything that she was and the incredible pieces of her personality and the legacy she left in her two boys..she lives on in them,” says Maegen McMorrow, Lingard’s cousin. “And it’s absolutely devastating that we don’t get to keep her. They don’t get to keep her.”

On February 28th, Jennifer Lingard was on vacation at a family cabin about 40 minutes outside of Fryeburg, Maine with her boyfriend and two young sons, ages 4 and 9.

While the details leading up to her death are unclear, Lingard was found beaten to death in a bedroom of her family cabin. Her boyfriend then left the children in the cabin, driving her car to Rhode Island along with her cell phone before committing suicide inside his Providence apartment. The children were unaware of what had taken place.

McMorrow says while the family had seen some red flags about Lingard’s boyfriend as a feeling that “something was off”, no one in the family had expected something like this and were not suspicious when the couple planned the trip. “It wasn’t the first time they had gone on vacation or spent time together. He had spent time around the family, it just seemed like a routine vacation,” she explains.

When the family was notified of her death, McMorrow says she and Lingard’s siblings quickly bonded together to take action. McMorrow recalled driving up to Maine with other family members to pick up Lingard’s children, thanking first responders in Fryeburg for keeping the children calm until they could explain the heartbreaking news. “I don’t think you know true pain until you watch a nine-year-old realize he’s gonna be an orphan.”

This was the second time the family had suffered a devastating loss. Lingard’s husband Chris, the children’s father and a Pawtucket Firefighter, had passed just two years prior to Jennifer’s death. “You don’t think it’s going to happen twice,” says McMorrow.

Today, the children are in the care of Lingard’s sister and “best friend”, Michaela and her husband, Mark. The couple, who just welcomed their own first child, will continue to raise Jennifer & Chris’ two children with the help of a GoFundMe that has now raised over $45,000.

“She was an incredible light. And you never expect something like this to happen to somebody like that,” says McMorrow.

ABC6 News did reach out to authorities in Maine to confirm an investigation is ongoing. We did not receive a response by the time of this publication.