Keep Our Students Safe

The muder of the Yale student upsets me to no end. We need to make our students safe. Violence has gone too far. People believe they can do anything and it is fine. This system is losing its value for life. This is my view.


NewsWorld newsUnited StatesYale student murder: police investigate lab technicianInvestigators of Annie Le murder focus on wounded lab technician who failed polygraph test
Buzz up! Digg it Daniel Nasaw in Washington guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 September 2009 16.19 BST larger | smaller Article history

Police have said the killing of Yale University student Annie Le was not a 'random act'. Photograph: AP

US police are investigating a laboratory technician over the murder of the Yale University graduate student Annie Le, whose body was found inside a wall on Sunday. No arrest has yet been made.

Police in New Haven have said definitively that no suspect is in custody and no students are suspected in the murder. But in an effort to allay public fears on the urban campus, police have said the killing was not a "random act".

Investigators have focused on a laboratory technician who failed a polygraph test and had defensive wounds on his body, New Haven news organisations reported, citing anonymous police sources. A New Haven police spokesman this morning batted down media reports that police expect soon to make an arrest in the slaying. Officer Joe Avery declined to comment further.

Investigators are examining bloody clothes found hidden in a ceiling in the building. They have determined the clothes did not belong to Le, but hope to learn whether they had been worn by the suspect.

In a case that has horrified the community at one of America's most prestigious universities, the bloodied, battered body of the 24-year-old pharmacology student was discovered crammed in a utility shaft in a heavily secured research building on the campus on the day she was to be married.

Le went missing last Tuesday morning, having left her wallet, keys and purse in her office in a medical school building about a mile from Yale's main campus. She was filmed by surveillance cameras during her final walk to the facility where her body was found on Sunday.

Access to the basement laboratory where Le's body was found is tightly controlled and workers there are required to swipe ID cards to gain entry, limiting the pool of potential suspects, the Yale president, Richard Levin, told medical school staff and students yesterday. The pavement outside the building is closely monitored by surveillance cameras.

Le was to be married to Jonathan Widawsky, a 24-year-old physics student at Columbia University in New York. The couple met as undergraduates at the University of Rochester in western New York state. Le was from California. Widawsky is not suspected in the slaying.

"She was generous, honest, caring and the list just keeps going," Le's roommate Natalie Powers said. "She was tougher than you'd think by just looking at her."