Auditors combing through Durham probation case files recently discovered that officers had been telling offenders to check in with them at probation offices instead of venturing out into the streets and neighborhoods where a fuller picture of the lawbreakers' lives and surroundings would emerge.

Such passive oversight quickly grabbed the attention of Robert Guy, head of the state's probation system.

"It's ridiculous," Guy said in an interview last week. "It's like they're a daggone doctor's office -- appointments to come in."

Demario Atwater, 21, and Laurence Alvin Lovette, 17, both charged with first-degree murder in the March slaying of Eve Carson, the UNC-Chapel Hill student body president, were supposed to be under the probation system's watch.

Lovette, also charged with murder in the January slaying of Abhijit Mahato, a Duke University graduate student, was placed on probation in Durham several days before the fatal shooting.

But Chalita Thomas, the officer assigned to track him, had been on the job for seven months and had not received the basic training necessary to make home visits. The correction department investigation found that Lovette never met with Thomas, who has since resigned.

Thomas, according to post-dated entries of her attempts to monitor the offender, asked Lovette in a note left in a door and in at least two cell phone calls to report to the probation office for a meeting.

Guy issued a stern e-mail message to Durham on April 9, directing probation and parole officers to get out from behind their desks and visit more offenders at home.

"IMMEDIATELY!" Guy said in the message.

In the past three weeks, Guy said, the Durham office has logged more than 1,100 field visits.

"It got their attention," Guy said. "It shouldn't come from this level. It's local management."

On Monday, correction officials transferred the head of the Durham office, Geoffrey Hathaway, to administrative duties in Granville and Person counties.

Mark Knelson, a radiologist whose wife, Lisa, was killed in an October 2006 traffic collision by a habitual felon and sex offender on probation, is not surprised the Durham probation office is under scrutiny.

Shawn Maurice Powell, with more than 100 charges in a 12-year span, ran a red light in a stolen car and crashed into Lisa Knelson, a mother of two who worked with special-needs children. The offender, Durham records showed, had not met any of the requirements of his probation for more than a year.

"It's been a tough couple of months for me after the Eve Carson death, wondering should I have made more noise, should I have sued the state," Knelson said.

He cannot fathom why, in an age where watches are equipped with GPS systems, this state's technology is so archaic that police officers and probation officers are not alerted by computer when an offender on probation or parole is accused of committing another crime.

"It sounds like there are some fundamental problems that should be addressed in this day and age," Knelson said. "For starters, having a commitment from the governor or somebody like that, that the data systems, sometime in the very near future, are going to be updated would help."

Durham, which struggles as Wake County does with high turnover and unfilled vacancies, has been singled out for problems before.

In 2000, state correction officials investigated Durham's probation office after an officer's pistol disappeared. That review turned up other problems. In a couple of cases, defendants had gone five years without reporting to an officer.

Others showed that officers had failed to tell supervisors promptly about serious crimes offenders committed while on probation. Seven supervisors and five officers were disciplined after the 2000 inquiry.

Ronald Stephens, a Durham County Superior Court judge, was so concerned about the probation cases he was seeing in the earlier part of this decade that he fired off several letters to office managers.

In many cases, Stephens said, it was obvious the officers had little or no contact with the offenders until it was time to terminate a probation.

Stephens said cases were being terminated when offenders had not paid back money owed or met all their probation requirements.

"There was a scramble right before the end" of an offender's probation, Stephens said. "But it's been better for several years now."

(Staff writers Joseph Neff and Sarah Ovaska contributed to this report.)

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.