The killers shot Eve Carson in the face and the head, one with a .25 caliber pistol, and the other with a shotgun, obliterating the right side of her pretty face. When the prosecution showed the jury autopsy photographs, some jurors wept.
Eve Carson was the golden girl—pretty, popular, brilliant, altruistic. Funny, too.
Born and raised in Athens, Georgia, Carson had been her high school class president, and was elected student government president at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. A senior, double-majoring in political science and medicine, she was an aspiring doctor. Attending UNC on a Morehead-Cain Scholarship, she was a North Carolina Fellow and a Phi Beta Kappa, taught science in an elementary school, tutored in a middle school, mentored girls in a track/character-building program, and volunteered summers in Third World programs. Whew!
But all that ended when a couple of black thugs turned her into yet another statistic.
At 3:30 a.m., on March 5, 2008, Carson was kidnapped by Demario “Rio” Atwater and Laurence Lovette Jr., as she left her house to get into her SUV.
Killer Demario James “Rio” Atwater in court
Made-over killer Laurence Lovette Jr. in costume during the Eve Carson murder trial. New ‘do, new suit; only the fake eyeglasses are missing.
Carson’s killers had been stalking the parking lot of a sorority house down the street. Caroline Harper, a UNC alumna who was then living in the sorority house, testified at Lovette’s trial that
…she had just finished talking to her boyfriend on her cell phone about 3:30 a.m. on March 5 when she saw two black men in their late teens or early 20s standing in the parking lot of her sorority house….
They were standing there looking at me,” Harper said. “It was just a couple of seconds before I got really frightened and drove away.
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