Reply #11: Clark a ‘nice guy,’ neighbors say

[IndianaGreen]

Clark a ‘nice guy,’ neighbors say

By Margy Slattery, Lauren Rosenthal and Esther Zuckerman
Staff Reporter, Staff Reporter, Staff Reporter
Published Thursday, September 17, 2009

In high school, Raymond Clark III pitched for the baseball team, made the honor roll and joined the Asian Awareness Club. Friends and acquaintances from high school described him as personable — certainly not likely to be a killer.

But DNA tests linking Clark, 24, to the murder of Annie Le MED ’13 place him at the center of a brutal homicide investigation. Clark’s arrest is expected this morning — ten days after Le was last seen entering the research facility where her body was found last Sunday, stuffed behind a wall in the basement.

Law enforcement officials named Clark a “person of interest” in the case Tuesday night, when police served one warrant to search his Middletown, Conn., residence and another warrant to take DNA samples from his body. A neighbor at Clark’s Middletown apartment complex, who declined to give her name but said she was a high school student, said Clark had lived on the first floor of 40 Ferry St. for five months with his fiancée, Jennifer Hromadka, who is also an animal lab technician at Yale.

“I once bummed a cigarette off of him,” the neighbor said. “He didn’t look like the kind of guy who would (kill someone).”

Another neighbor, Sana Cotten, said Clark was not well-known in the apartment complex but that neighbors were surprised to see him under police surveillance Monday and Tuesday.

“He was a nice guy,” Cotten said. “Nothing alarming, nothing that would make you say, ‘He’s kind of weird.’ ”

Cheryl Preneta, who lived on the same street as Clark and took the bus to school with him when the two were children, said she dropped the television remote in her hand when she heard the name of a fellow Branford High School graduate on television Tuesday night. Preneta and other Branford High friends then took to Facebook to discuss the news.

“All of us can’t believe that he was questioned,” she said in a phone interview Tuesday. “But we’re just waiting to see if the evidence points to him or not, and we’re all just hoping it doesn’t.”

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/features/2009/09/17/clark-nice-guy-neighbors-say/