Raymond Clark III wedding

Raymond Clark III wedding

Raymond Clark III, 24, was released at 3 a.m. Wednesday after complying with a search warrant to take the samples, said Joe Avery, a spokesman for the New Haven police. Mr. Clark had been a focus for investigators at least since Monday, when unmarked police cars pulled up to the apartment complex in Middletown, Conn., where he lives. The body of the graduate student, Annie Le, was found Sunday secreted in a basement wall inside the building. The case has been ruled a homicide, even though the cause of death has yet to be released. On Tuesday night, Chief James Lewis of the New Haven police said the technician, Raymond Clark III, 24, was in custody but did not call him a suspect. Chief Lewis said investigators had taken about 150 items from the crime scene with potential DNA evidence they could compare. He also said they had interviewed 150 people and watched 700 hours of surveillance video from the cameras in and around the building where the body of Ms. Le was found — and where Mr. Clark also worked.

Mr. Clark was held for about five hours in the Connecticut State Police Barracks in Middletown before being released to his lawyer, Mr. Avery said on Wednesday morning. Although the chief said on Tuesday that Mr. Clark would be either charged or exonerated anywhere from 24 to 72 hours, Mr. Avery added a note of caution to that statement, saying, “Who knows. DNA sometimes takes a while.” And he revealed that there had been no complaints made by Ms. Le against Mr. Clark before her death, at least to the knowledge of his department. In fact, he said, the slain woman had made no complaints of any type of harassment against anyone. It remained unclear on Wednesday morning whether there was any connection between Ms. Le and Mr. Clark beyond the fact that they worked in the same facility. For much of Tuesday, officials declined to say officially if anyone was considered a suspect. And when Chief Lewis appeared at the news conference, he said that investigators were still looking at other people who had access to the building, near the Yale Medical School.

Neighbors of Mr. Clark said that on Sunday afternoon, around the time Ms. Le’s body was discovered, he left with his companion, who is also a technician at the Yale lab. The neighbors said they got into a Ford Taurus that drove away. It was not clear when he returned — no one answered the door in midafternoon. But the police picked him up there around 10 p.m. on Tuesday, a week after Ms. Le disappeared and two days after she was to have been married on Long Island. “We are making sure there are not any other suspects, making sure we don’t have tunnel vision,” Chief Lewis said. He declined to discuss how Ms. Le had died. Early in the day, the chief state medical examiner’s office said it would release the cause of death on Tuesday afternoon. But it did not do so, saying the state’s attorney in New Haven had asked that the information not be released “in order to facilitate their investigation.”