Category: News and Views
Annie Le, 24, has not been seen by family, friends or co-workers since Tuesday, police say.
The remains were found inside a wall at 10 Amistad Street, said Peter Reichard, New Haven, Connecticut, assistant police chief.
"She hasn't been positively identified, however, we are assuming that it is her at this time so we are treating it as a homicide investigation," Reichard said.
Le was last seen on a Yale security camera entering the Amistad medical research building at about 10 a.m. on Tuesday. Authorities have not found images of her leaving the building.
Investigators said they had spoken with students and others in the building who confirmed she was there.
Police discovered the body in the basement Sunday afternoon, said Yale University President Richard Levin in a statement to the campus community.
Police plan to work through the night to remove the unidentified body, which is still in the wall, police spokesman Joe Avery told CNN.
Le, 24, was to be married Sunday in Long Island, New York. Her fiance, Jonathan Widawsky, is a graduate student at Columbia University in New York.
"Our hearts go out to Annie Le's family, fiancé and friends, who must suffer the additional ordeal of waiting for the body to be identified," Levin said. "I have met again with her family and conveyed to them the deeply felt support of the Yale community."
Investigators probing the disappearance of the pharmacology student earlier were testing bloody clothes found hidden in ceiling tiles in the Yale building, a law enforcement source told CNN. The bloody clothes are among the potential evidence being tested.
William Reiner of the FBI's New Haven office said Sunday that investigators are searching a waste facility that normally handles garbage from the Yale lab. He described it as a routine step.
"In a situation like this, it's common for us to follow the trash," Reiner said.
The search was taking place at the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority landfill in Hartford, near New Haven.
Le received her undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester in New York and majored in cell and developmental biology with a minor in medical anthropology. She conducted a summer project at the National Institutes of Health on bone tissue engineering using mouse mesenchymal stem cells, according to a biography posted on the NIH Web site. While at the University of Rochester, she conducted research involving parasitic wasps.
She is originally from California, and graduated from Union Mine High School in 2003, where she was named "Best of the Best," and "Most Likely To Be The Next Einstein."
Her high school principal, Tony DeVille, described her as being well liked.
"She was very smart, well-rounded, liked by peers and very involved in school,"
This is truly disturbing. While I was at Yale we had two cases that I remember. Firstly deanof one of the residential colleges was dismissed and then jailed for having a computer full of child porn and one of the student association presidents was mugged and killed whilst walking outside the campus (like many other Ivy league universities especially, Yale is in the middle of a pretty poor and not at all safe neighbourhood). The msot dramatic thing I witnessed was a guy trying to kill himself by jumping out of a window on the 7th floor and was hanging there screaming while his room mate held him up waiting for the police. This was in the middle of exams.
The scary part though, is that almost certainly, this was no random act of violence done by a stranger, it must've been co worker, professor or possibly the fiance (althogh I believe he's not suspect).
I hope this will be resolved, but it'll mark a particularly gruesome and sad story in the Yale archives.
wow how disturbing she was found in the walls - or at least her clothing was? Terribl. Hopefully they wil find the guilty party ASAP.
very very strange!
This is so sick and disturbing. People are so awful and the ways they find to kill people and hide the evidence is more and more perturbing.
wow wildebrew for real? that's insane. the fiancee isn't a suspect but i bet it was a maitanence guy or something. they had to know how to get past the cameras. but then again it's yale, people aren't stupid there. i know competition is fierce there so wonder if she was close to discovering something before someone else did and the person didn't like that. regardless, this is too sad and disturbing. and to hide the body in the walls? jeez
oh my god, this is just awful, omg. These stories are so sad. This girl had so much of her life ahead of her. just omg.