Why the Eve Carson Story Matters

A friend asked recently about my fascination with the Eve Carson story. I had never heard of Eve until the story of her murder broke. But once I saw the effect her loss had on the campus of UNC at Chapel Hill and began to dig into the details, I realize that this is a very significant story.

Eve was the student body president of the University of North Carolina. With only weeks to go before her graduation, she was abducted from her apartment very early one morning and a short time later brutally murdered.

At lunch the day it happened, I heard that there had been a murder. A scream and gunshots reported by a friend who lived in the neighborhood. A murder scene. But there were no details. What unfolded has captivated me ever since.

I'm an alumnus, class of 1984, and I live in Chapel Hill, which would explain my initial interest. But what makes this story so compelling is that on any continuum, it shows us everything: what is right in this world and what is wrong, our strengths and our weaknesses, the hope which can be fostered and the destruction of neglect.

By looking at the individuals - Eve and her murderers, Demario James Atwater and Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr. - we see good and evil, the hopeful and the hopeless, the privileged and the abandoned. And when we look at the "system", that unaccountable void to which we too often point a finger, it's easy to see what's been placed on display and what's been swept under the carpet.

We need the display. We needed Eve Carson and we need more like her. The tragic irony is that had she lived, she was just the sort of person who would have helped clean what's under the carpet.

WATCH THE VIDEO (ATW ORIGINAL):