Together in Grieving

Shades of blue: Duke fans wore ribbons to honor UNC's slain student body president. Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images

This spring the Duke and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill communities came together to honor and remember the victims of two recent shootings.

Players, coaches, and spectators observed a moment of silence for Eve Carson, a senior and president of UNC's student government, before a men's basketball game played between the two schools in Cameron Indoor Stadium in early March. Fans in the Duke student section also pinned Carolina blue ribbons to their shirts to honor Carson, who died just three days before the game.

Carson was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds on March 5 in a residential neighborhood not far from UNC's campus. A week after her death, police arrested Demario Atwater, twenty-one, and Laurence Lovette, seventeen, both of Durham, and charged them with first-degree murder in the case. Lovette and Stephen Oates, nineteen, have also been charged in the murder of Abhijit Mahato, a graduate student in engineering at Duke, who was shot and killed in his apartment near the campus on January 18.

In memory of Mahato, twenty-nine, who was originally from Tatanagar, India, Duke has established the Abhijit Mahato Memorial Fellowship to provide financial support to an international graduate student who is studying engineering. Preference in awarding the fellowship will be given to a student from India.