As friends and family mourned the death of 21-year old senior Linda Trinh on Wednesday, Baltimore City Police officials said that her murder was probably not a random act.
"Due to the investigation, it doesn't look like this was a crime of opportunity. It doesn't appear that the person just wandered in off the street," said officer Troy Harris, a police spokesman.
But he said that police are trying to determine whether she knew her attacker.
"We haven't found anything in her life to show that she would have been involved with a criminal element, so at this point we're ruling that out," he said.
Detectives are now working to establish a timeline leading up to Trinh's murder. Her roommate saw her last at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, Harris said. Eight hours later, at 11:30 p.m., a maintenance worker from the building responded to a neighbor's complaint about an odor of natural gas in Trinh's apartment. The man has told police that he does not know whether she was still alive at the time.
When Trinh's roommate finished working that night, she returned to her building at 3333 N. Charles St., but was unable to reenter her apartment because the door was locked and she didn't have a key. She spent the night elsewhere, Harris said.
When she returned on Sunday and was still unable to get in, she notified a building employee who let her into the apartment. The Washington Post reported in its Wednesday editions that the roommate then found Trinh's partially clothed body facedown in a half-filled bathtub. The newspaper also reported that she had a bruise on the left side of her face.
Her roommate subsequently notified authorities and Harris said that police responded to the call from The Charles Apartments at 12:28 p.m. The first officers on the scene observed a strong smell of natural gas but found no sign of forced entry. Trinh was pronounced dead at 12:40 p.m.
At the scene, the death was reported as suspicious and it was not until late Monday afternoon that the State Medical Examiner's office ruled her death a homicide and determined the cause of death to be asphyxiation.
Harris said that the Medical Examiner's Office is still trying to determine Trinh's time of death and whether she was sexually assaulted.
On Tuesday, Detective Chris Beiling, the primary investigator for the case, stressed that the investigation "was in its infant stages." He said that investigators were far from "hitting the proverbial stone wall" that occurs after they have exhausted most of their options for solving a case, and said that detectives were pursuing several avenues.
Those who knew her reacted to Trinh's death with a mix of shock, anger and sadness. In an email sent to faculty, staff and students, Brody said that the biomedical engineering major from Silver Spring, Md. was "was well-known, widely admired, liked and respected."
Friends remembered Trinh, who had served as president of Alpha Phi sorority and had played on the varsity volleyball team, as a dedicated student who still found time to devote to her research and to extracurricular activities.
"Her loss diminishes all of us, even those who did not know her, because hercontributions as student, leader, colleague, and, most important, friend, have helped to build the Johns Hopkins we love so much," Brody wrote.
In wake of the attack, Baltimore City Police and Hopkins security have increased patrols in the area. In addition, Hopkins security has placed a 24-hour guard at the apartment complex and management at The Charles Apartments has hired a private security guard to patrol during the evening and overnight hours, according to a Hopkins security department email.
Trinh's death marks the second murder of a Hopkins student in just nine months. In the early morning hours of April 17, 20 year-old junior Christopher Elser was stabbed in the fraternity house in which he was staying. He was only able to provide a vague description of the killer before he died of his injuries the following day.
Despite offering a $50,000 reward leading to the capture of Elser's killer, the case remains unsolved. In July, police revealed that they wanted to speak with a "person of interest" who appeared on the security camera of a nearby building in the hours before Elser was stabbed. But in September, Detective Vernon Parker told the News-Letter that the person of interest was "not as interesting" as once hoped and said that police had decided against charging him with the murder.
Parker said Tuesday that although both murders occurred within a close proximity--Trinh lived just a few blocks from where Elser was killed--the cases seem to have little in common. "There is no nexus between the two of them. They seem to have completely different circumstances and a different M.O." Whereas investigators in Elser's case hypothesized that the murder had occurred after an attempted burglary, "theft does not seem to be involved in this case," Parker said.
But the differences between the two investigations could bode well for detectives trying to solve this case, he said. Unlike the Elser murder, which took place after a busy party and involved a crime scene where hundreds of people had been present just hours earlier, Parker said that detectives in this case may be aided by a more pristine crime scene which they could potentially use to find forensic evidence to track down the killer.
Still, he cautioned that this could prove to be another complex investigation. "These cases are very difficult," Parker said. "Sometimes you need some luck to go along with good police work and science on your side."
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