Acting Baltimore City Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm said Wednesday that detectives are looking at a person of interest in connection with the murder of senior Linda Trinh, 21, but said that an arrest was not imminent.
The Commissioner's comments came as detectives indicated that they were satisfied with the investigation's progress so far.
"We are moving as fast as humanly possible. On a really simple level, you crawl before you walk," Detective Chris Beiling said. "I'm very pleased so far."
Beiling, the primary investigator for the case, declined to confirm the existence of a person of interest. However, he said that police officials continue to conduct interviews with people who may have come into contact with Trinh to learn more about her whereabouts on the nights before she was killed.
"A timeline is being established. People are being eliminated," Beiling said.
He said that investigators are also waiting for the results of forensic tests. Detective Donny Moses, a police spokesperson, cautioned that the investigation is far from over.
"There is nothing that should come down the pike for several weeks," he said regarding the prospect of police making an arrest.
Investigators continue to believe that Trinh's murder may not have been a random act, according to Officer Troy Harris, a police spokesperson.
"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," Harris said.
In constructing a timeline, police officials said that Trinh's roommate saw her last at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday. 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. She then found Trinh's body and subsequently notified authorities.
Harris said that police responded to the call from The Charles Apartments at 12:28 p.m.
The first responding officers 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.
This week, Beiling down played media reports that Trinh may have been sexually assaulted before she was killed.
"The medical examiner has backed off that now," he said.
He also dismissed reports that the smell of gas had anything to do with Trinh's murder. He said that the combination of the stove's age and the recent history of pilot light problems were important factors.
"There is a definitive history in the maintenance logs that there have been numerous complains to the smell of gas," he said. "The gas stove is a moot point."
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 where 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 $50,000 of reward leading to the capture of Elser's killer, the case still remains unsolved.
In July, police officials 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 last week that although both murders occurred within a close proximity - Trinh lived just a few blocks from where Elser was killed - the cases have little in common.
"There is no nexus between the two of them. They seem to have completely different circumstances," he said. 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."
But the differences between the two investigations could bode well for detectives trying to solve the Trinh case, Parker 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, Beiling said that investigators must be thorough and deliberate.
"We're progressing as fast as we can and as the investigation lets us," he said.
