IN MEMORIAM
‘Eve’s Mantle Has Been Passed to Us’
‘Eve offered
so much.
I’ve never
known someone
so immune
to the cold,
so confident
against the
fleeting.
Eve had an
anchor —
a hold on
something
sincere,
something
bigger than
rhetoric.’
Ben Lundin ’07
The crowd pictures cannot do justice
to the extraordinary outpouring of
emotion and the craving for
togetherness created by Eve Carson’s ’08
tragic and still-mysterious death. Polk Place
on the afternoon of the day the news
broke looked like it did on Sept. 12, 2001.
The Pit on the evening of March 6 was a
feast of candlelight, and some 10,000 people showed up at the Smith Center in her
remembrance two weeks later.
Carson commanded attention. Not
nearly all those in the quad that day could
have known her or even known much
about her. What they found out is that she
not only commanded attention, she made
herself well worthy of it. Her status as the
student body president does not explain this.
Students might bond with a dynamic professor or a popular athlete; they don’t naturally bond with the student body president.
Carson seems to have far transcended her
title. Account after account of the people
who worked and played with her assure us
that the words scribbled on her hand on the
back cover of this magazine were genuine.
The telling of her story made those who
weren’t close to her wish they had been.
Some looked at the turnout and surmised that the slaying was a shocking
wake-up for the supposed invincible. But
Carson’s classmates were not unconditioned to violence and sadness. One senior
had this to say in a letter to a newspaper:
“What rubbish. Those of us graduating
this year have witnessed a homicidal former student plow a car through our campus. We’ve absorbed the tragic deaths of a
student who fell from a dorm window and
a beloved mascot killed by a car. We’ve seen
our dance clubs and our neighborhoods
become scenes of senseless gang violence,
and we’ve quietly seethed as the Apple
Chill street festival became a casualty of
violent intimidation. We’ve grieved deeply
for our peers at Virginia Tech.”
His letter suggests that this grief is specific to Carson.
Her roster of involvement at Carolina is
longer than these pages. One of the first
groups for which she worked was Nourish
MOREHEAD-CAIN SCHOLARS SENIOR PHOTO, COURTESY OF MARY MOORE MCLEAN
International, a hunger relief organization
started by UNC students in 2002 that
has evolved into an antipoverty nonprofit
with a nationwide reach. She co-chaired
Nourish in 2005.
“She was committed to quality and,
therefore, very concerned with framing our
mission correctly,” wrote Joel Thomas ’06,
who now heads the organization. “She
cared deeply about discussing poverty in
the right way. After returning from a trip to
Ecuador through the Morehead Scholars
program, I remember Eve saying, ‘Poverty
is not the same as unhappiness.’
Eve Carson in her
Morehead-Cain
Scholars senior
photo.
The news that the
shooting victim was
Carson came after
noon on March 6. By
3 p.m., this is what
Polk Place looked
like. “Let us be the
University that Eve
Carson envisioned,”
Chancellor James
Moeser said.
