Demario Atwater, 21, had not received as much as a phone call from his probation officer for more than a year.

Laurence Alvin Lovette, 17, had a probation officer who, after seven months on the job, still had not received basic training or met the teenager.

The mistakes were so egregious that Robert Guy, the man in charge of the state's probation system, announced Wednesday that veteran administrators from the state Division of Community Corrections would temporarily take the reins in Wake, and comb through cases there and in Durham.

The top three managers in the Wake County probation office have been reassigned temporarily to jobs with no decision-making power.

"It's a flat-out embarrassment," Guy said.

The shuffling comes nearly a month after Carson, president of the UNC-Chapel Hill student body, was shot in a neighborhood near campus.

Atwater, a felon who was supposed to be under the watch of the Wake County probation office, was passed from officer to officer -- 10 officers and supervisors in three years. Not one, Guy said, realized that a curfew, weekly meetings and nighttime checks should have been imposed.

Even worse, Guy said, probation officers lost track of the offender for more than a year. Once the paperwork was started to revoke Atwater's probation, seven months passed before a supervisor approved the revocation.

"There are major deficiencies that we're going to address from top to bottom," Guy told reporters Wednesday.

Lovette, assigned to probation three months ago in Durham, stands accused not only of slaying Carson -- he also is charged with the first-degree murder of Abhijit Mahato, a Duke University graduate student found shot between the eyes in January.

The juvenile record that Lovette amassed before his 16th birthday was not available to his probation officers in the adult courts.

In January, when Lovette was convicted of three misdemeanors relating to a break-in, the teenager was assigned to the lowest level of supervision, meaning he should have met with a probation officer once a month. That never happened.

Most details about Lovette's probation were not put in his file until he was named a suspect in the two homicides. The officer assigned to keep up with him has been assigned to desk duty because of legal troubles of her own -- a drunken-driving charge in December.

Although the officer reported the arrest soon after to her supervisor, the information was not passed up the chain to top administrators for weeks.

Guy has asked veteran administrators to go review all cases in Durham and Wake in an attempt to restore the public's trust in the probation system. "We need to examine operations and personnel practices in both of these divisions," Guy said.

Problems elsewhere

Problems have festered outside the Triangle, too.

In 2004, the National Institute of Corrections was called in by the state legislature to study the probation system. The outside consultants found that equipment was antiquated, probation officers were underpaid, caseloads in some regions were high, officers were discouraged from trying to revoke probation, and vacancies stayed open too long.

North Carolina's 2,012 certified officers oversee 128,000 offenders: 118,000 on probation, parole or other post-release supervision and 10,000 in community service.

Despite recent reform attempts, Triangle probation offices still grapple with heavy caseloads, high turnover, an information disconnect between the adult and juvenile courts, and archaic communications systems.

Improvements planned

To address the high vacancy rates in urban counties, Guy said he might start shifting money and people from judicial districts with fewer cases to those with the higher numbers.

Guy said administrators also would do more random case checks with the hopes of exposing problems sooner.

As the investigation continues, some who have followed the debate closely wonder whether the fixes in store really get at the root problems.

"It will keep some unsafe people locked away for a little while," said Al Singer, a Raleigh lawyer and advocate for more education and anti-poverty programs. "We have to dig deeper to keep people from going there in the first place."

Bill Jarman, who runs a Raleigh marketing firm, said he's not confident problems will be fixed.

"In state government, they tend to want to fire two or three of the sacrificial lambs and not take care of the real problems," Jarman said Wednesday. "I didn't hear them say they're going to undertake a statewide evaluation."

Guy said there could be further punitive actions after the audits in Durham and Wake.

Even with further reform, Guy cautioned, there are no guarantees. In two or three years, Guy said, he might be back in the same uncomfortable spot, explaining how offenders under his watch had slipped through the cracks.

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