Students Hold Benefit Concert for Eve Carson

Chapel Hill, N.C. — A benefit concert in honor of slain University of North Carolina Student Body President Eve Marie Carson was held Sunday evening.

The 22-year-old senior from Athens, Ga., was shot to death near the UNC campus March 5 in what Chapel Hill police have called a random act.

The memorial concert – organized by UNC students – was supposed to be held Saturday on the Polk Place quad, but was rained out.

"One of the things that Eve talked about was having a great concert to bring the student body together," organizer Ronald Bilbao said.

Local restaurants donated free food for the 1,000 students expected at the benefit held inside UNC's Great Hall.

"Everything that everyone has said about her is 100 percent true. She did bring a shining light into any room she walked into," Bilbao said.

The BackBeat, the Friday Afternoon Jam, the Nothing Noise, the Huguenots, and Nine PM Traffic performed for free from 3 to 7 p.m. Organizers also sold T-shirts in the student's honor and accepted donations for the Eve Carson Memorial Fund.

"I was friends with Eve, and I think this is just a great event to raise money for the fund and to express how much she meant to all of us,"  Emma Din said.

Carson, a pre-med major studying political science and biology, was active in leadership and service roles. As a Morehead-Cain scholar, she spent her summers volunteering and working overseas in Ecuador, Egypt and Ghana.

She was considering spending the summer after graduation volunteering in Kibera, a section of Kenya's capital, Nairobi, that was wracked by rioting early this year.

Demario James Atwater, 21, and Laurence Alvin Lovette, 17, both of Durham, are charge with first-degree murder in Carson's slaying.

Orange County District Attorney Jim Woodall said a hearing is scheduled for May 5 to determine whether to pursue the death penalty against Atwater.

Woodall said he has not decided whether to try the case as a capital case, but that state statute requires the hearing to be set 45 days from indictment.

Lovette cannot be executed. A 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibits executing anyone who was under 18 at the time of a crime for which an adult could be executed. The harshest punishment he could face, if convicted of either crime, would be life in prison.