Tech charged in Yale killing

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – As police charged a Yale animal lab technician with murdering a graduate student who worked in his building, a portrait began to emerge Thursday of an unpleasant stickler for the rules who often clashed with researchers and considered the mice cages his personal fiefdom.

Police charged 24-year-old Raymond Clark III with murder, arresting him at a motel a day after taking hair, fingernail and saliva samples to compare with evidence from the grisly crime scene at Yale’s medical school. Bond was set at $3 million for Clark.

The muscular former high school baseball and football player is charged in the death of 24-year-old Annie Le, a pharmacology doctoral student at Yale who vanished Sept. 8. Her body was discovered five days later stuffed into a utility compartment behind a wall in the basement of the building where she and Clark worked.

Co-workers told police that Clark was a “control freak” who viewed the laboratory and its mice as his territory, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

At a news conference Thursday, New Haven Police Chief James Lewis called Le’s death a case of workplace violence.