bvelliquette@heraldsun.com; 419-6632
HILLSBOROUGH — Orange-Chatham District Attorney Jim Woodall has scheduled Laurence Lovette to appear Orange County Criminal Superior Court on Nov. 28 to face charges that he killed Eve Carson.
“I anticipate that there is going to be a trial,” Woodall said, rather than a plea arrangement like the one that federal prosecutors made with Demario James Atwater in 2010. Because Lovette was 17 at the time at the time of Carson’s death, a first-degree murder charge does not carry the risk of the death penalty.
Lovette was charged, along with Demario James Atwater, with kidnapping Carson from her home in Chapel Hill, driving her to various ATMs to withdraw money from her account, and then shooting and killing her in the early morning hours on March 5, 2008.
Atwater, who was over the age of 18 and faced the possibility of a death sentence, was indicted by a federal grand jury. In September 2010, he pleaded guilty in federal court to a series of crimes associated with the death of Carson and was sentenced to life in prison. The next month, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, armed robbery, possession of a firearm by a felon and possession of a weapon of mass destruction in Orange County Superior Court. He was given a life sentence, which he will serve in state prison if he is ever released from federal custody.
Atwater is incarcerated at Florence High United States Penitentiary 45 miles south of Colorado Springs, a high-security prison used for housing male offenders. It is part of the prison complex that includes the federal prison known as Supermax.
Lovette was not indicted by the federal grand jury.
Lovette also is charged in the death of Abhijit Mahato, a 29-year-old engineering student at Duke University, who was found shot to death in his apartment in January 2008. A trial date for that case in Durham County has not been set.
At the time of her death, Carson was the student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
