Annie Le’s murderer may have been a young lab technician (he apparently failed two lie detector tests and has defensive wounds to his chest) whose refusal to give the investigators a DNA sample meant that police raided his apartment last night in order to get one. They led him away in handcuffs.
If reports that Le was asphyxiated, and that she was found fully clothed, are true, the crime seems less about erotic obsession than about rage. Did the guy feel Le had dissed him in some way?
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Piling on to the sadness at Yale is the death of another student — a recent graduate — while riding her bicycle in the city:
Sylvia Bingham ’09, a Yale graduate who was passionate about social justice and the environment, died Tuesday morning. She was 22.
Bingham was en route to her job in Cleveland shortly before 9 a.m. when a truck collided with her bicycle. She passed away at St. Vincent Charity Hospital soon after. The truck driver did not stop, but police located him that afternoon using information provided by witnesses.
… Professor Hannah Brueckner, the director of undergraduate studies for sociology who got to know Bingham during her senior year, described her as a “fearless intellectual, a skilled field worker, and a committed activist.”
… “She showed up on my birthday with a box of dainty little madeleines that she had baked for me,” [a Yale friend] said. “I think that cookie and that act represent her persona perfectly: she was bursting with creativity and was a teeny, quirky fashionista.” …
September 16th, 2009 at 1:46PM
This heartbreak’s been going on for more than a couple of decades. During and immediately after my New Haven days, one undergraduate I knew killed herself, another recent graduate and cyclist who’d taken the class I’d ta’d was run over by a bus, and a third I’d known died at the hands of a street robber. The latest deaths serve to remind me of those old losses, the losses of people I’d hoped to have around for a long time to come.
September 16th, 2009 at 2:40PM
Yes. These things are bad enough in themselves; they also stir terrible memories.
September 16th, 2009 at 7:15PM
Thank you for this post and its predecessors on Annie Le.
September 16th, 2009 at 7:22PM
You’re welcome, tony.