Eve Carson’s mother says Durham police ‘grievously failed’ Mahato family

The mother of Eve Carson says the Durham Police Department failed the family of Abhijit Mahato with an incomplete investigation into his slaying.

“Their faith is abused; Durham police and officials through their scant investigation grievously failed them,” Teresa Carson wrote in an email to The News & Observer on Thursday.

A jury on Wednesday acquitted Laurence Alvin Lovette on accusations that he robbed and murdered Mahato, a Duke University graduate student who was found dead in his Durham apartment on Jan. 18, 2008.

Teresa Carson’s daughter, Eve Carson, was found shot to death in Chapel Hill on March 5, 2008, weeks after Mahato’s execution-style killing. Lovette is serving a lifetime prison sentence after being convicted of kidnapping the student leader from her home just blocks away from the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. Carson was driven to ATMs to withdraw money, then shot five times in the middle of a quiet residential street.

Demario Atwater, Lovette’s co-defendant in the Carson case, pleaded guilty to the crimes without a trial. Both men are serving life sentences.

Teresa Carson attended Lovette’s trial in Mahato’s death in the Durham County Courthouse for two of the six days of testimony and arguments.

“I wanted to stand in solidarity with the family of Abhijit Mahato,” she wrote.

Teresa Carson was working at a shelter on the Rio Grande in Texas on Wednesday when she learned that the jury acquitted Lovette.

“I did not expect that verdict at all,” she said.

Despite the verdict in the Mahato case, Lovette was not freed. He continues to serve the prison sentence he received in the Carson case.

“While it is true that Lovette will terminate his serial criminal murderous life in prison, this is a painful verdict and, after six years, a bitter outcome,” Carson wrote in the email.

The unanimous verdict from the 10 women and two men on the jury has raised a new round of questions about the Durham Police Department and its investigative procedures and policies.

A deeper look

On Thursday, Durham Police Chief Jose Lopez said he plans to take a deeper look at what happened six years ago after law enforcement officers arrived at the Anderson Street apartment complex where Mahato was found.

Mahato was 29 and in his second year of a doctoral engineering program at Duke. He was found with a gunshot wound between his eyes.

Durham police had been getting reports of a spate of robberies in January 2008, many of them targeting Hispanics in the community and people near the Duke campus.

Assistant District Attorney Jim Dornfried told reporters after the trial that prosecutors “worked with what we were given.”

“Obviously the defense pointed out certain deficiencies,” Dornfried added. “I would leave that to the police department to explain why those deficiencies existed.”

Police initially charged a different man. But the district attorney’s office dropped the charges in 2013, saying a key witness could not be found.

Karen Bethea-Shields and Kevin Bradley, the defense team for Lovette in both the Durham and Chapel Hill cases, argued that prosecutors in Durham based their whole case on one key witness whose account of what she knew about the Mahato killing changed greatly over the years.

That witness, who came forward only after the Carson murder, was initially interviewed by Orange County investigators and a federal grand jury.

Closing questions

In their closing arguments, Lovette’s defense team raised questions about the lack of physical evidence in the Mahato case. DNA evidence was tested, but samples were contaminated in the lab, according to testimony.

The defense team also asked jurors to consider why prosecutors had called the lead homicide detective in the Carson case to the stand and not Durham’s lead investigator.

“We are conducting an internal review on our handling of the 2008 homicide of Abhijit Mahato to determine what, if any, shortcomings of our investigation may have been a contributing factor to the not guilty verdict,” Lopez said in a statement released Thursday. “As with all violent crimes, our concern is with seeking justice for the victims and the truth concerning the incident.”