EL DORADO HILLS, Calif. — Shared grief has made them like family, but not the way they had ever wanted, the mother of a slain Yale grad student told her devastated fiancé yesterday at the young woman’s funeral.
“John, even now, Annie is gone, but I still have you. And I love you so much, like my son,” Vivian Van Le told John Widawsky, who was set to marry Annie Le the day her body was discovered murdered at the lab where she did her doctoral work.
Le’s mother then read a poem in her native Vietnamese, which her son Christopher, a student at the University of California, Davis, fought back tears to translate.
“Farewell, my child. You are here lying in the cold coffin, leaving behind the wailing of loved ones. I sing you lullabies by your side, so sweet, like I did when you were a baby, wishing you a peaceful sleep. They are now sung through my crying sobs, sung to wish you an eternal blessed sleep,” the poem read.
Nearly 500 people wished Le, 24, a final farewell yesterday — including at least 100 members of her extended family — at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church.
“Although our beloved Annie is no longer with us, she continues to live and shine deep within our hearts as we remember her,” said her uncle and parental guardian Robert Nguyen.
Le was born to Hoang and Vivian Van Le, but after her parents divorced and her father remarried she and her brother Chris went to live with her aunt, Ngoc-Tuyet Bui, and uncle, Nguyen.”
Le met Widawsky as the two studied at the University of Rochester. She was doing doctoral work at Yale in pharmacology while Widawsky pursued a physics degree at Columbia University.
She disappeared on Sept. 8 while working in the lab, and her body was discovered crammed inside a wall five days later — the day the couple was set to marry.
Lab technician Raymond Clark III has been charged in her death.