Lawyers in Carson case seek records

Defense attorneys for the suspects accused of killing UNC-Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson want complete access to Crime Stoppers files -- a request that gives police pause about the long-term effect on anonymous tipsters.

In North Carolina, state law requires prosecutors and police to share with the defense all evidence they gather. But Crime Stoppers organizations are private, and in the minds of some law enforcement officers that means not all their tips have to be handed over to the defense.

In Chapel Hill, Crime Stoppers workers forward information they gather to police, who decide what goes in the investigative file that ultimately should be released to defense attorneys. The defense attorneys, however, want access to all tips that are phoned in, in an effort to see what leads police did not pursue.

Crime Stoppers doesn't take names and phone numbers from callers, but some fear information on tip sheets could lead to the identification of sources, especially in cases where only a few people might know the details of a crime.

"If the defense were successful in getting that information released it could have a chilling effect," said Brian Curran, the Chapel Hill police chief.

It was a Crime Stoppers tip that led investigators to the two men accused of kidnapping and killing Carson, who was found shot to death in a Chapel Hill neighborhood less than a mile from campus.

A tipster called Crime Stoppers on March 11, according to court documents, and told the person taking the call that she had spoken to a man she knew as "Rio," who told her that he and someone else had taken Carson to an ATM and planned to obtain her bank card PIN before killing her.

The information from that call led investigators to Demario Atwater, 22, one of the suspects accused of murder in the case. Laurence Alvin Lovette, 18, also is accused of murder in the fatal shooting.

But dozens of other Crime Stoppers tips were received in that case, and only the one that led to the arrest of Atwater and Lovette is part of the case files.

James Williams, Jonathan Broun and Karen Bethea-Shields, the attorneys for Atwater and Lovette, have refrained from discussing their strategy except in the courtroom and in motions.

Jim Woodall, the district attorney for Orange County, also has declined to comment about the case outside the courtroom.

But a motion filed by the defense attorneys asking for access to law enforcement files, including all Crime Stoppers information, sets the stage for a hearing in the coming weeks that gets at how much leeway Crime Stoppers has in refusing to reveal, even in court, information from a tip.

"It's something that ought to get some scrutiny, and it ought not to be an automatic disclosure," said Colon Willoughby, the Wake County district attorney.

Identities protected

When a tipster calls Crime Stoppers, he or she is immediately given an identifying number, said Tommi Bridgeman, president of the N.C. Crime Stoppers Association and vice president of the Southeastern Crime Stoppers Association.

That number then stays with the caller as the information is put on a tip sheet that will be forwarded to law enforcement and eventually to the bank if a cash reward is provided for the tip.

"The good thing about Crime Stoppers is we don't know the caller's identity," Bridgeman said. "We don't have call tracers, and we don't have caller ID. Nothing on the tip sheet indicates whether the caller is a male or a female. I don't think the defense will have anything helpful on the tip sheet."