Mahato’s killers fell through several legal cracks

“We’ve got a lot of kids out there who have a sense of helplessness, with a propensity for violence,” said Durham Police Chief Jose Lopez.

Lovette, 17, is accused in the slaying of graduate student Abhijit Mahato from Jharkhand at the Duke University, and he and Atwater, 21, are charged in the death of the University of North Carolina student body president.

A third defendant, 19-year-old Stephen Oates, was arrested a few days after Mahato’s death and charged with murder and more than a dozen robberies.

A doctoral student in computational mechanics at Duke, Mahato was found in his apartment a few blocks off campus in January. His autopsy said the 29-year-old from Tatangar was shot at point-blank range in the forehead as a pillow was held tightly against his face. His wallet, cell phone and iPod were missing.

Eve Carson was also shot in the head, once in the right temple, her wallet and keys missing. Her body was found March 5 in the middle of a residential street a mile from the North Carolina campus. The death of the student body president sparked a widespread outpouring of grief.

The tragedies have brought together two renowned centres of academic excellence separated by just eight miles.

Atwater and Lovette were both students at Durham’s Charles E Jordan High, a school with a diverse student body and test scores that exceed the state and national average. Last week, a senior from Jordan won a $100,000 scholarship in the annual Intel Science Talent Search.

Atwater left in 2002; Lovette dropped out sometime last year. After pleading guilty to misdemeanour, larceny and breaking and entering, Lovette received a two-year suspended sentence and was placed on probation January 16. Prosecutors believe he and Oates killed Mahato two days later.

In the six weeks that followed, authorities in Durham arrested Lovette several times and charged him with nine different crimes. He was released after each arrest.

Robert Lee Guy, director of the state Division of Community Corrections, said probation officers do not automatically receive information alerting them when one of their charges pleads guilty or is convicted of another crime.

But Guy said the state is investigating Atwater’s case. He violated his probation last June when he was convicted — and sentenced again to probation — on a gun charge. It was not until last month that he was served with a probation violation warrant.

Atwater’s court appearance on the probation violation was March 3 — two days before Carson’s death. The case was assigned to the wrong courtroom, Guy said, and rescheduled for later this month. Atwater was also supposed to be under a stricter form of probation that required him to meet weekly with his probation officer, Guy said.

“Most of the time those reviews take place and everything looks above board,” Guy said. “The rarities (are) like this case… Most of them are not the tragedy of this nature.”

Should either Lovette or Atwater be convicted of first-degree murder, they could fall through one final crack: neither is likely to face a death sentence.

For Lovette, it’s a guarantee. In 2005, the US Supreme Court banned the execution of people under 18. For Atwater, it might as well be; since North Carolina resumed executions in 1984, jurors in Orange County have not sentenced anyone to death.