William Shakespeare used his mastery of language and fertility of imagination to probe the human soul, with all its capacity for joy and suffering, love and hatred, generosity and selfishness, goodness and raw evil.
It turns out that Eve Carson, the UNC-Chapel Hill student body president who was robbed and shot to death in an encounter with evil personified, had been working on a Shakespeare assignment when she was abducted from outside her house a little after 3:30 a.m. on March 5, 2008.
A copy of "Hamlet" was found open on her living room couch. She may have been en route to the student government offices to print something out or make copies, as she often did late at night.
We can imagine her probing those characters who faced the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" when she was swept up in a modern tragedy of social failings and hideous cruelty.
One man, DeMario Atwater of Durham, who was 21 at the time, has pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence in federal prison. Prosecutors contend that Atwater fired the coup de grace with a sawed-off shotgun after his accomplice (or was it the other way around?), Laurence Alvin Lovette, also of Durham, left Carson stricken on the pavement with four nonfatal handgun wounds.
Lovette's trial on murder charges will conclude this week. We will not hear from him. Although Lovette's attorneys say those who have fingered him have self-serving motives that taint their credibility, the evidence has been compelling that, as a 17-year-old, he was so unhinged from anything resembling a sense of right and wrong that he set off on a course of robbery and murder just to gain some spending money.
And did he not know that ATM machines have surveillance cameras? Carson's bank card was used to withdraw $1,400 from machines in Chapel Hill and Durham, and a camera image identified by a witness as Lovette's is plain to see.
Lovette had been a one-main crime wave from his mid-teens. He spent time in a youth lockup but kept being put back on the street. Oh, and he's accused of killing someone else prior to the Carson slaying - Duke grad student Abhijit Mahato, shot execution-style in his apartment, evidently during a robbery.
Not even counting the murders, in which Lovette's role is still being weighed, the layers of dysfunction on view here are profound.
He should have been locked up for crimes committed as a juvenile. Once released, he should have been subject to intensive probation. The fact that he wasn't - Atwater also fell through the probation system's gaping cracks - illuminated scandalous deficiencies in that system. Heads rightly rolled and reform efforts commenced, too late to salvage wasted lives.
The state, even in a Promised Land of good schools, well-resourced justice system, dedicated personnel and strong laws, can't prevent every instance of young people turning feral. Families and communities share the obligation - could even be said to bear the bulk of it.
Lovette's father died unexpectedly when Lovette was middle school aged, and perhaps that was a reason he started getting into trouble.
But if others tried to fill the void and steer him right, it didn't work. Especially for young people who are at risk because of poverty, shattered families, an environment shadowed by drugs and gang violence, there simply has to be more help. More role models. More constructive activities and ways to make an honest buck.
Lovette's trial has given us a look into corners of life in the Triangle that many would rather not know about, where people scrabble on the ragged edge and view crime as just another way to get by.
Shanita Love, Atwater's girlfriend, gave powerful testimony implicating Lovette and helped investigators recover parts of weapons apparently used to kill Carson. That's to her credit. But what a dismal picture she painted: She and her three children, ages 3, 2 and 1 at the time, living with Atwater - Daddy to the kids - at his mother's house; Atwater the dope-dealer on the prowl at night while she tried to get enough rest so she could handle her job at a sub shop; Lovette hanging around their place in the days after the murder.
Think of those kids. Think of what they're up against if they're to escape the kind of surroundings they've known so far, where the person slouched in front of the TV might be a drug dealer, a robber, a killer.
"Hamlet" plumbed varieties of malice fueled by jealousy, passion, the quest for power. Shakespeare's tragedies all tell stories of people undone by the toxic motives that beset the human condition. But we also glimpse the virtuous motives of love and sacrifice.
Eve Carson was a loving, giving person who, by one second-hand courtroom account, asked her abductors to pray with her. That account, curiously, could have originated only with one of the killers. The tragedy is that they were hardened to her gesture and blinded to her beauty.
