On the morning of September 8, 2009, security cameras showed Annie Le, a doctoral student in the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology, entering the campus building in which she worked as an animal researcher. When Le failed to return home that evening, her roommates reported her missing to local police. Because security footage didn’t show Le leaving the building, authorities immediately closed it off, and Le’s body was found five days later, hidden inside a wall in a basement laboratory. She had been strangled. It was September 13 – the day on which Le, 24, was to be married. On September 17, police arrested Raymond Clark III, also 24, a lab technician who’d been working in the building on the day that Le disappeared. As of this writing, neither Clark nor the police have indicated any motive, but New Haven police chief James Lewis is on record as saying, “This is not about urban crime, university crime, [or] domestic crime, but an issue of workplace violence, which is becoming a growing concern around the country.”

How much concern? In 2007, the last year for which there is reliable data, there were more than 5,600 work-related deaths in the United States. Of these, 864, or 15 percent, were due to assaults or other violent acts; homicides accounted for 628 deaths, or 11 percent of the total, with murder passing “Contact with objects and equipment” to take over the number-two spot in cause of workplace deaths (“Transportation incidents” remains number one). According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 7,000 workplace homicides nationwide between 1997 and 2007, but it’s important to remember that most of these resulted from robbery or some other form of violent activity performed by third parties (such as customers or strangers) rather than by coworkers, who were responsible for about 1,000 homicides during the 10-year span.