Annie Le's Family Prepares for Killed Student's Funeral
Police chief says no further arrests expected in Yale grad student murder.
Sept. 21, 2009— -- Annie Le's family is making preparations for her funeral, but it says the intense media attention has made grieving for the slain Yale graduate student all the more difficult.
The family appealed for privacy as Raymond Clark, a technician who worked with Le in the lab where her body was found and stands accused of killing her, sits silenty in a high security prison in Connecticut .
New Haven Police Chief James Lewis told The Associated Press today that police do not plan to make any additional arrests in the case. There had been concern that Clark had help, possibly in the days after Le was killed.
Annie Le's body was transported to a Northern California funeral home over the weekend, a few miles from the 24-year-old's home town of Placerville. A private funeral will be held there Saturday, Sept. 26.
"We just want the media to respect our privacy. We have a lot of stuff to do. This makes it all the much harder," Le's brother Chris Le told ABC affiliate KXTV.
"She lived a good life. We want to respect that and have others respect that as well," her brother said.
Her mother, aunt, uncle and members of her fiance's family last week held a small memorial service on the Yale University campus, soon after Le's strangled body was found hidden in basement wall panel in a university laboratory.
Although she disappeared Tuesday, Sept. 8, her body wasn't wasn't found, crammed into a wall cavity, until Sunday, Sept. 13, the day she was scheduled to get married.
Clark was arrested Thursday, Sept. 17.
"Both families were there. Jonathon's family as well as Annie's," said the Rev. Dennis Smith, the Le family's spokesman who officiated at the ceremony in New Haven.
Smith said Columbia University graduate student Jonathon Widawsky, who was to marry Le, was holding up emotionally "as well as can be expected."
Smith said he was with the family as it learned details of her death.
"So traumatic for them all the way through. … But they were handling it very well," he said.
