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Diana Stoianov, a 17-year-old freshman, and other students hold a candlelight vigil Monday for Annie Le on the Yale niversity campus. She was a tiny woman with a huge, infectious laugh. She was a brilliant thinker who saw in medical research a dream of healing. On Monday, authorities in New Haven confirmed that Annie Le, a graduate of Union Mine High School in El Dorado County and a promising medical scholar, had been killed. Connecticut's chief medical examiner formally identified Le's body that had been found late Sunday, hidden inside the wall of a laboratory building at Yale University. Meanwhile, the New Haven Register newspaper reported Monday that authorities were focusing their homicide investigation on a lab technician who works in the building. The newspaper reported that multiple police sources said the technician drew the interest of authorities after he was found with scratches on his chest in apparent signs of a struggle. Officer Joe Avery of the New Haven Police Department told The Bee that authorities have taken no suspect into custody. He said police believed that Le, a doctoral student in pharmacology, was targeted by someone while inside the laboratory building, a facility that requires multiple swipes from a security card to gain access. "We are not looking at it as if it were a random act," Avery said. "I don't think anybody out there really has to worry too much. But they should take their proper precautions." On Sunday night on Facebook, Chris Le ? a UC Davis student and Annie Le's younger brother ? posted a tribute to his sister. "As a family, we take solace in the fact that though she is gone, she left this world doing what she loved," he wrote. "She may be small, but she be fierce. Stuck in a 4' 11" frame, she had a 7' tall personality. She will always live on through us." Yale President Richard Levin met with Le's parents Sunday to convey "the deeply felt support of the Yale community." On Monday, Rocky Tuan, who mentored Le in consecutive summer research internships at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. mourned the loss of "a very dedicated individual, full of energy, full of enthusiasm and just really curious about all kinds of things." Le, who graduated at the top of her class at Union Mine and went on to study cell and developmental biology at the University of Rochester, was awarded the highly competitive internship during her junior year of college. Tuan would soon be writing her a glowing letter of recommendation for graduate school at Yale after witnessing her abilities ? and her passion ? in conducting stem cell research at NIH. On her own Web page for the institute, Le said she was working on a project to further understanding of bone and cartilage formation to develop medical treatments for patients suffering from degenerative bone diseases. Even amid the intensity of lab research, Tuan said Le was "a sunny person and delightful to have around. "She was a very outgoing person, very happy-go-lucky, extremely interactive," Tuan said. "It is so sad to see this very bright woman snuffed out like that. It breaks my heart." Le was due to be married Sunday at the North Ritz Club in Syosset, N.Y., to Jonathan Widawsky, a graduate student at Columbia University whom she met as an undergrad at Rochester. "Lucky I'm in love with my best friend," Le wrote on Facebook. Her loss was felt deeply by those who knew her and saw her incredible early promise. "From the time we were sophomores in high school, her dream was to be a doctor. She knew what she wanted. She was serious about it," said Cierra Montes, 24, a Union Mine graduate who took some of the same advanced placement classes and was a fellow member of the National Honor Society. At Union Mine, Le was in the Culture Club. At the rustic campus amid foothill oaks near the rural town of El Dorado, classmates would join her at lunch to talk up Asian or Russian history. "I can hear her laugh in my head right now," Montes said. "She inspired people throughout our school. She made them dream big." The tragedy triggered a confusing sense of grief for Shaun Perisho, another Union Mine classmate who is now a graduate student at the University of Southern Mississippi. "We're at an age where we don't quite know how to deal with this," Perisho said. "This is the first death for most of us. ? You think, 'Should I be crying? Should I be in shock?' " He added: "Everybody will say that she was special and different, and she was. But this girl was going to fix things." That was apparent to the staff at Marshall Hospital in Placerville, where Le was a junior volunteer in 2002 and 2003 in a program for high school students interested in medicine. "A large part of her experience was spent in the pathology department," said hospital spokeswoman Carrie Poggio. "She was observing pathologists, being able to look at (tissue sample) slides, interpret them and bounce her opinions off of the physicians. "She was just stellar. She stood out. There is a lot of sadness here, not only for her family but for the loss of quite a bright star." Montes, who is married and works for a church in McAllen, Texas, said Le's research at Yale included working on a cure for diabetes. The Bennett Laboratory at Yale where Le worked conducts enzyme research for potential treatments with cancer, diabetes and muscular dystrophy. Dennis Jones, a Yale graduate student in immunology, told the New York Times that he interviewed Le when she arrived at the university in the fall of 2007. Jones called her a "focused person" who "asked good questions." He said he frequently saw Le pushing a cart with mice she used in experiments. In her biography for her NIH internship, Le said she wanted to work as a medical researcher and in academia or for the health institute. But first, she had a new life to start. Some 160 invitations had gone out for her wedding Sunday. Then she was gone. Le was reported missing Tuesday. Her identification, money, credit cards and purse were found in her third-floor office at the Yale medical school. Five days later ? on her planned wedding day ? her body was found. Monday the end of a brief, brilliant life became official. "I think in the back of our minds we knew something bad was going to come out of this," said Union Mine Principal Tony DeVille. "But when you actually hear the news that it has turned out badly, it is just devastating. "She had a great potential to perhaps change the world."