Northwestern professor, Oxford employee sought in slaying
ASSOCIATED PRESS
This composite photo shows Wyndham Lathem, on left, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Northwestern University, and Andrew Warren, an employee of the University of Oxford in Great Britain. A judge on Monday issued arrest warrants for Lathem and Warren in connection to the stabbing death of a Chicago man on July 27.
CHICAGO >> Police are searching for a Northwestern University professor and a University of Oxford employee suspected in the stabbing death of a Chicago man and have alerted law enforcement agencies around the country that the pair should be considered armed and dangerous.
Anthony Guglielmi, a Chicago police spokesman, said today that a Cook County judge issued first-degree murder warrants for Wyndham Lathem, 42, and Andrew Warren, 56, in the killing of Trenton Cornell-Duranleau. Cornell-Duranleau, 26, was stabbed to death last week in a 10th floor apartment believed to be Latham’s in the River North neighborhood.
Police have not released a possible motive or said how they linked the suspects to the killing, but Guglielmi said security camera footage shows them leaving the building that night.
Guglielmi said Lathem and Cornell-Duranleau knew each other, but he didn’t know any details about the relationship. He said investigators determined that Warren, who lives in England, came to the U.S. recently for the first time, but he didn’t know if Warren knew the victim.
Officers went to the apartment last Thursday night after the person working at the building’s front desk called to report that he’d received an anonymous call about a crime having been committed in that unit. Cornell-Duranleau, who lived in the Heart of Chicago neighborhood on the city’s lower West Side, was pronounced dead at the scene. The medical examiner’s office said he died of multiple sharp force injuries.
A Northwestern University spokesman, Alan Cubbage, said in a news release that the school is cooperating with the investigation and that Lathem has been placed on administrative leave and banned from entering school property. He said there is no indication that Lathem, an associate professor of microbiology-immunology who has been on the faculty since 2007, is a danger to anyone at the school.
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Warren is a senior treasury assistant at Somerville College in England, which is part of the Oxford University network, according to a university website.
According to an obituary posted by Cornell-Duranleau’s family on the website of The Argus-Press of Owosso, Michigan, Cornell-Duranleau had a cosmetology license. The obituary doesn’t say when Cornell-Duranleau came to Chicago, and the family didn’t reply to calls seeking comment.
