Annie Le

The murder of Annie Le (pronounced "lay") occurred on Tuesday, September 8, 2009, on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Le (July 3, 1985 - September 8, 2009) was a 24-year-old Vietnamese American doctoral student at Yale University School of Medicine in the Department of Pharmacology. Le disappeared on September 8, 2009, from a research building on the New Haven campus and was found dead in a Yale University medical building at 10 Amistad Street.
Incident
On the morning of September 8, Le left her apartment and took Yale Transit to the Sterling Hall of Medicine on the Yale campus. At about 10:00 AM, she walked from Sterling Hall to another campus building at 10 Amistad street, where her research laboratory was located. Le had left her purse, cell phone, credit cards, and cash in her office at Sterling Hall. She entered the Amistad Street building just after 10:00 AM, as documented on footage from the building's security cameras. Le was never seen leaving the building. At approximately 9:00 PM on the evening of September 8, when Le had still not returned to her home, one of her five housemates called police to report her missing.
Because they were puzzled that security camera footage did not show Le exiting the building at Amistad Street, police closed the whole building for investigation. Police also searched through refuse at the Hartford dump, where Yale's garbage is incinerated, looking for clues in Le's disappearance. The FBI, New Haven Police and Connecticut State Police were all involved in the search. On Sunday, September 13, authorities discovered Le's body inside the wall of a basement laboratory in the Amistad street building of Yale's Medical Campus. Bloody clothes had been found previously above a ceiling tile in the same lab. MSNBC and other news networks reported on September 14 that police may have identified a suspect, who has defensive wounds and failed a polygraph test. A New Haven police spokesman, however, denied those reports and indicated that no suspects had yet been identified.. The building and the area are monitored by around 75 security cameras and the entrance to the building and the rooms inside the building require Yale ID card in order to be opened and accessed. Police said this homicide doesn't seem like a random act and probably she was targeted for some reason. The basement where the body was found houses animals (mostly mice) that are used for experiments and research. Due to high security measures in the building, authorities and Yale officials maintain that it would be extremely difficult for someone without a Yale identification card to enter the basement laboratory where Le's body was discovered, leading them to focus their investigation on Yale employees and students.
The Yale community publicly mourned Le's death. The Yale Daily News reported that professor and Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis called September 14 the "saddest day to open class" since the day after September 11, 2001.
Personal
Prior to her graduate education at Yale, Annie graduated as class valedictorian from Union Mine High School in California in 2003, before becoming an undergraduate student at the University of Rochester in New York where she majored in cell and developmental biology with a minor in medical anthropology.
She was due to be married on September 13,2009, in Syosset, New York, to a graduate student in applied physics and mathematics at Columbia University, Jonathan Widawsky.
Le had previously composed an article for Yale Medical School's B Magazine entitled "Crime and Safety in New Haven," published in February 2009.
Yale murders
* In 1998, Suzanne Jovin, a 21-year-old senior at Yale, was found stabbed to death. Prior to Le's death, Jovin's was the last on-campus murder at Yale University, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.
* In 1991, Christian Prince, a sophomore and fourth-generation Yale alumnus, was killed as part of a hate crime and robbery committed by 16-year-old James Duncan Fleming. Fleming received a nine-year prison sentence.
* In 1974, Gary Stein, a Yale junior, was murdered during a robbery near Grove Street Cemetery. Melvin Jones was convicted in the case and spent 15 years in prison.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu