Man in custody in Yale death

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – New Haven Police Chief James Lewis said at a news conference Tuesday night that police executed a search warrant for the Middletown apartment of Raymond Clark, a “person of interest” in the slaying of Yale student Annie Le.

“We took him into custody to gather evidence from his body and his person,” Lewis said. “If he cooperates, he’ll be released this evening.”

Lewis said the search warrant was for Apartment 1A at 40 Ferry St. in Middletown, where at 10:16 p.m. about 20 New Haven, state and federal law enforcement officers, armed with the search warrant, entered the apartment building.

Seven minutes later, an unmarked police car pulled up to the apartment building’s front door, and another minute later officers escorted a man in a white T-shirt out of the building and placed him in the car. The car then was driven off.

Lewis said police have looked at 700 hours of videotape, interviewed 150 people and gathered 150 pieces of evidence in the case.

Clark worked as an animal technician for the Yale Animal Resources Center, which “provides for the daily care of all animals used in research at Yale (95 percent of which are rodents),” according to Yale’s Web site.

Le was asphyxiated and her body was stuffed into a barely 2-foot-long crawl space inside the research laboratory where she had gone to work on the day that she disappeared, sources told the Hartford Courant earlier Tuesday.

Chief Medical Examiner H. Wayne Carver II held off Tuesday on releasing the cause of death, saying he did not want to influence the investigation.