Clark’s teammates in a state of disbelief
http://www.middletownpress.com/articles/2009/09/23/news/doc4aba4e9e8cdb5369963229.prt
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
By William Kaempffer
NEW HAVEN — If Raymond J. Clark III was worried about being arrested for murder, he didn’t show it when he arrived for his Sunday morning softball game.
His fiancee, Jennifer Hromadka, a fixture at all his games, took her usual position in the stands. His mother cracked jokes with the wives of other players. If the 24-year-old had the weight of the world on his shoulders, he hid it well, his shocked teammates said Tuesday.
He already had been grilled by the FBI and was the prime suspect in the high-profile strangulation slaying of Yale graduate student Annie Le, although none of his teammates knew it at the time.
“He actually offered to play catch that morning, like any other day,” said Manny Perez, 20, a teammate on the New Haven Wild Hogs, the team for which Clark played shortstop this year. “He offered to warm up. Nothing was weird. It was the same old Ray, with his fiancee and parents at the game,”
No one noticed the New Haven narcotics detectives keeping a watchful eye on their “person of interest.”
That was Sept. 13. Three days later, the Yale University animal technician’s face was all over the news, as he was handcuffed and loaded into a police car to provide DNA samples to compare with evidence found at the crime scene. He would be charged with murder 20 hours later.
“It’s just surreal to me,” said teammate Jose Perez, 22, of New Haven, “to see him in the news for that case. It’s heartbreaking to know one of my friends actually committed something like that.”
The Wild Hogs were without their starting shortstop Tuesday night — Clark is jailed in lieu of $3 million bail — when they played Chico’s Bail Bonds/TCB at the Connecticut Sportsplex in North Branford. Some players talked about their former teammate; others wouldn’t.
All expressed disbelief that their friend could be accused of such a terrible crime, and all repeated what has been said again and again by people who know him: He was just a normal guy.
Last Sunday’s game, they said, got a late start. The field they were supposed to play on had been washed out by rain, so the league sent them to East Shore Park, where they waited for about an hour for another game to end. Clark appeared to be carefree. He and his family chatted amicably and caught up with people they hadn’t seen in a while. He was the one outsider on the Wild Hogs, a team mainly comprised of cousins, bothers, nephews and lifelong friends. Last year, Clark played on a different team with Wild Hogs player Richard Santana’s three younger brothers, but it didn’t have the players to field a team this year.
“We needed a shortstop and they said, ‘Ray is the guy.’ So we grabbed Ray,” said Santana, 28.
Clark is accused of strangling Le, who was pursuing her doctorate in pharmacology, and stuffing her body into a utility conduit inside a wall. She disappeared Sept. 8. Her body was found Sept. 13, the same day she was supposed to marry, and the day Clark played his last softball game.
Since his arrest, his teammates have read and heard what was said about him, that he was controlling toward Hromadka, that he yelled at a neighbor’s children. His teammates said they saw no hints of that behavior.
Hromadka never missed a game.
“She’d sit there with her wedding magazine, flipping the pages and looking toward the future, and letting the other girls admire her nice, big ring. It’s sad,” said Luz Viera, the Wild Hogs coach’s wife. Clark would sometimes play with teammates’ children before games.
“It’s so hard to believe. He used to play with my son and daughter all the time,” Santana said.
The Wild Hogs know their team is being talked about. In the opposing dugout Tuesday night, one player looked across the field and noted to a teammate, “That’s Ray Clark’s team.”
On another field, a third baseman and outfielder talked about the case as they took their positions mid-inning.
“Everyone looks at us, all the players on the teams look at us, point at us. They don’t say anything, but you can tell what they’re doing,” said Viera, who said she still has a hard time fathoming that Clark could be guilty.
“It’s hard when you know him because you feel pity for him. If we didn’t know him, we would be like, ‘Oh my God, throw that guy in jail.’ But we know him, so it’s hard to believe he’d do that.”
