Doesn’t this sound like a bad joke?
You don’t get in often enough to clean your mouse cages. The tech in charge of the animal facility gets huffy about it. You run up against him when you pop into lab fairly late at night, probably to get things tidied up before you get married that weekend.
You get murdered. The tech gets accused and locked up unless he raises millions of dollars in bail.
Some variant on this scenario actually happened. Ms. Le went missing while I was at the conference in Vermont; CNN spent hours speculating about it, showing photos of the security cameras over the modern lab building where she worked, the badges one needs to swipe to get into it to start. The attendees murmured about it. Anyone who has been into lab late at night to take care of experiments or animals thought about it.
Lauren is a postdoc at Yale, and perhaps can report on what her institution proposes to reassure its employees about their safety in the workplace – from humans. I’m afraid there are no right answers, only wrong ones, and hindsight is always the clearest.
I also extend my heartfelt sympathy to the families of Annie Le and Jonathan Widawsky. Now I think of it, to the family of Raymond Clark III, as well. I’m sure they could all benefit from sympathy right now.
Scary, Scary stuff – I’ll be more careful before I get huffy with a colleague in future.
At UCL we had lone worker alarms for people in the lab when no one else was around, these went off if you failed to move for a period of time and the alarm also went off downstairs in the security office – doesn’t really help if you’re already dead though!
That is terrifying – I hadn’t heard this story before now.
That is terrible. I can’t think of any other way of putting it.
It was all over the press in the U.S. and I suddenly realized that such news is really rather regionally disseminated. I wonder if the same thing happened in France, what the reaction would be? Would it even make it to the news? Or are such murders so extraordinarily rare that one would hear about it incessantly, even after the prime suspect had been arraigned, as for similar acts of barbary? Isn’t this particularly unusual because of the laboratory setting?
Samantha – those alarms would not be so good for me, as sometimes I get carried away at the computer…
Scary – I hadn’t heard this story either.
Really scary. Really really scary.
Apparently this was in the news here but only made the BBC website not any of the broadcasts.