http://www.charlotte.com/109/story/525620.html
Student's murder
shocks Chapel Hill
Stunned and grieving, thousands gather on UNC campus
MANDY LOCKE, JESSE JAMES DECONTO AND SAMUEL SPIES
(Raleigh) News & Observer
HO
AP
This undated photo of Eve Carson, student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was released by the university Thursday, March 6, 2008. Police Thursday identified a young woman found shot dead in a Chapel Hill, N.C., residential neighborhood as Carson, 22, of Athens, Ga. Authorities had no suspects in her death. (AP Photo/Courtesy of UNC, Jim Stratford)
* Slideshow: Chapel Hill mourns loss
* Guest Book | Post thoughts, condolences
* Carson's life was filled with promise
* Video: Carson welcoming students
CHAPEL HILL --
Candlelight glowed on evening-darkened faces. Friends sat hugging, laughing, sobbing -- remembering Eve Marie Carson as her photos flashed across a projection screen. In many, she smiled back.
Two thousand people closed a day of grief in UNC Chapel Hill's Pit on Thursday night, holding candles and listening to song. They came to mourn their student body president, who was found shot to death the day before.
"This is the kind of event," said graduate student Abbey Thompson, "that shakes a campus to the core."
It was the second time a crowd of students met Thursday to remember Carson, whose body was discovered about a mile away early Wednesday. The 22-year-old senior from Athens, Ga., had been shot multiple times, including once in the head, police said.
Officials said there are no suspects and no arrests had been made.
"We have lost someone whom we cherish and love," university Chancellor James Moeser told a crowd on the school's Polk Place quad earlier in the day. "We're all in a state of shock."
Police found Carson's vehicle, a blue 2005 Toyota Highlander with Georgia plates, after receiving a tip Thursday afternoon from a witness who spotted it on a dead end street near Franklin Street. It was just around the corner from where Carson lived.
Police Chief Brian Curran could not say how long the SUV had been there but said police believe the vehicle was driven from Carson's home in the hours before she died.
"I can't tell you why I think that, but I'm confident it was," Curran said. "We think that whoever perpetrated the crime was at some point in that car."
Carson's roommates had to identify her body early Thursday, a day after a report of gunshots led police to the upscale Hillcrest neighborhood on a wooded hilltop northeast of the UNC campus.
Police found Carson's body about 5:15 a.m. She was wearing a dark blue T-shirt, gray sweatpants and white athletic shoes.
Police don't know why she would have been out so early Wednesday. Roommates told police they had left the house at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, and she stayed there to study.
Curran said her death appeared to be a random act. The medical examiner said there was no indication that Carson had been sexually assaulted.
The police chief said the last time a UNC student was murdered in Chapel Hill was in 1995, when Wendell Williamson, a law student who had threatened other students and caused disturbances on campus, opened fire on several people on Henderson Street. He shot lacrosse player Kevin Reichardt, 20, knocking him from his bicycle, then firing again, killing Reichardt as he tried to crawl away.
Moeser said he got a call early Thursday morning that Carson was the victim. "I sat down and said `Oh my God.' I couldn't believe this."
By Thursday afternoon, news of Carson's death trickled slowly across campus. Students huddled in hallways and sat in the sun, tangled in hugs, tears and whispers. Several thousand came to Polk Place, a grassy quad that draws students in the best and worst times.
"This is a tragedy magnified and multiplied by the number and depth of the meaningful relationships that Eve Carson had on this campus," said Moeser, standing on the South Building terrace. "If we want to respect and remember Eve Carson, we will do it by embracing each other."
Students sank into one another, clutching flowers and tissues as a television helicopter buzzed overhead. The bell tower played "Hark the Sound." Moeser urged those gathered to drop their daisies and carnations at the base of a leafless oak.
They met again after nightfall for the candlelight vigil at The Pit. An a cappella group sang Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" as a slide show from Carson's life played on a 10-foot screen.
"If they saw a smile on Eve's face, they were smiling," said Carly Swain of Charlotte, a double major in journalism and drama. "If she was having fun, they had fun for a second because that's the kind of power she had over people."
Carson was a prestigious Morehead-Cain scholar and a North Carolina Fellow, taking part in a four-year leadership development program for undergraduates. A premed student, she majored in political science and biology, taught science at a Chapel Hill elementary school, studied abroad in Cuba, and spent summers volunteering in Ecuador, Egypt and Ghana as part of a school program.
In a narrated slideshow on the Morehead-Cain Web site, Carson described how she spent eight weeks in Ecuador one summer, living with a family, working in a hospital and teaching children. Two days a week she shadowed a doctor in a rural part of the country.
"Most of the time I was in the back room of the hospital, where their emergency room was and where the overnight patients were. So I saw a lot of surgeries, I saw a few childbirths. I caught a baby," she said with pride.
At her family home in Athens, Ga., late Thursday, people gathered to grieve on her parents' lawn. Her parents and her younger brother were too grief-stricken to talk, a family friend said.
At Clarke Central High School, where Carson graduated in 2004, principal Maxine Easom said she and staff members learned of her death Thursday morning.
"We're devastated," said Easom. "Eve was just the most wonderful young woman you would ever want to know. She was brilliant. She was absolutely beautiful. Everything she did was aimed at helping other people. It's one of the greatest tragedies I've ever known. Eve was one of the young women who could change the world."
Motive unclear in killing of much-loved student body president
![[thinking]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/010.gif "Thinking [thinking]")
![[angry]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/008.gif "Angry [angry]")
![[sad]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/004.gif "Sad [sad]")
![[frown]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/003.gif "Frown [frown]")
