(Updated) A graduate pharmacology student asked Yale’s police chief a question: ““What can one do to avoid becoming another unnamed victim?” Seven months after she printed the answer in a campus publication, the student may have become a crime victim herself.
And she is hardly unnamed.
Her name is Annie Le. The 24 year-old doctoral candidate’s name and her face have been plastered on front pages and on television news screens across the country this week after her mysterious disappearance.
And a manhunt has ensued like none other for a New Haven crime.
Le — dubbed the “brilliant beauty” in a front-page New York Post headline Friday — disappeared some time after showing up for work at a lab at 10 Amistad St. at 10 a.m. Tuesday. She left behind her purse, her cellphone, cash — and a fiancee in New York to whom she planned to wed on Sunday.
“More than 100 law enforcement officials … continue to work around the clock on
the search for Ms. Le,” Yale’s public information office stated in a release issued at 5 p.m. Friday.
The release announced a $10,000 reward for “information leading to the whereabouts of missing student Annie Le.” People can call a 24-hour hotline at 1 – 877-503‑1950. (See the flyere here.)
FBI agents have come to town to help investigate Le’s disappearance. They pored through garbage bags at 10 Amistad and searched inside Le’s East Rock apartment, while a television crew maintained a round-the-clock vigil outside. The state police have sent in its canine unit, according to Sgt. Chris Johnson.
Pete Reichard, New Haven’s assistant police chief, said he has assigned Sgt. Martin Dadio and six detectives on the 4 to 12 p.m. shift to help interview people at 10 Amistad.
“The Yale Police Department and FBI are running everything. We’re assisting,” Reichard said Friday. He said the seven cops assigned to help are working on other cases, too.
“We told them we’d give them whatever they need. This is what they asked for,” Chief James Lewis said.
Lewis said it’s not unusual for the FBI to be called in to help with missing persons, especially if — as in this case — key people to interview are out of state. Le’s fiance attends Columbia University in New York. Her family lives in California.
Yale officials say there’s no evidence to cast any suspicion on the fiance, who rushed to New Haven upon learning of Le’s disappearance and has cooperated with the investigation.
By mid-afternoon Friday officials reported no new leads. That left people continuing to wonder, with no facts to support either thesis, whether Le’s mysterious disappearance had to do with her upcoming wedding or whether it was foul play.
The latter scenario has already produced some unwelcome national publicity for New Haven at a time when crime has dropped 10 percent over last year. It creates ominous echoes of the still-unsolved 1998 murder of Yale undergraduate Suzanne Jovin and the 1991 murder of undergraduate Christian Prince. Murders — or mysterious disappearances — of Yale students have a way of doing that.
The press frenzy this week reminded Mayor John DeStefano of the 2003 bombing at Yale Law School, in which no one was hurt. Within hours the international media was camped out in town and the city was consumed with dealing with the case. Part of the reason for the attention was the still-fresh memory of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, DeStefano said. Another part was — it happened at Yale. If the incident had taken place at Quinnipiac University’s law school, the frenzy would have never materialized, DeStefano noted.
“It becomes a national story because it’s a national institution,” DeStefano said of the Annie Le case. “Having national institutions is a double-edged sword. It gets you an extraordinary acknowledgment on some days. On other days,” the city can take a hit.
Annie Le herself considered New Haven a dangerous place, based on the lead story she wrote in the February issue of a medical campus student publication called B Magazine. (Read it here.) She cited statistics portraying Yale as more dangerous than other Ivy campuses and New Haven as more dangerous than other cities. Then she interviewed Yale Chief James Perrotti about how to avoid becoming a crime victim.
After running through Perrotti’s advice, Le concluded, “All cities have their perils, but with a little street smarts, one can avoid becoming yet another statistic.” Those who knew her — and even those who didn’t, but have tuned into the ominous unfolding drama in New Haven — are hoping Le doesn’t turn out to have become one of those statistics.