Patrols step up in Duke vicinity

Killing, holdups jar community

DURHAM -- The recent slaying of a graduate student and two armed robberies near Duke University have prompted city and university police to increase their presence around campus.

Local police had no new information Monday on the murder of Abhijit Mahato, an engineering doctoral student found shot dead late Friday in his apartment on Anderson Street, several blocks south of the campus. Nor was there additional news on two armed robberies near the Poplar Manor Apartments just north of campus late Sunday.

University officials huddled Monday, working on plans for one or more memorial services for the slain student while also devising a plan to increase enforcement around campus, said Aaron Graves, Duke's vice president for campus safety and security.

"It's just random acts of violence in the city of Durham," Graves said. "We can't continue to do business as usual. We have to step it up. It has changed the way we do business."

Graves said the incidents, taken collectively, have jarred the campus community and have people talking. He said students should be careful but not worry unnecessarily.

"The perpetrator doesn't know if the person is a student or not," Graves said. "It's a crime of opportunity."

In the first robbery, a graduate student walking near the apartments about 7 p.m. Sunday was approached by a man holding a handgun. The gunman took the student's wallet, cellular phone and iPod.

Three hours later, a Duke employee walking near his apartment with his wife was robbed of his wallet by a man with a handgun.

Police suspect the same man in both crimes.

Paul Slattery, Duke's student government president, said the university let students know about the incidents swiftly via e-mail. Though most students generally feel safe living and spending time in the neighborhoods on the periphery of campus, the killing and holdups have raised some eyebrows, Slattery said.

"It's not just something you see in the media that happened in the abstract," he said. "It happened to somebody who is part of your community."

Mahato, 29, was in his second of four years at Duke, pursuing a doctorate in engineering that focused on computational mechanics. He earned technology and mechanical engineering degrees from schools in India. He spent two years at the GE Global Research Center in Bangalore, India, before coming to Duke.

The neighborhood surrounding his apartment complex is not one with a high incidence of crime. Police statistics show there were six assaults and five robberies -- and no homicides -- there in 2007.

In India, family and friends grieved and wondered why anyone would want to shoot a student described as soft-spoken and polite, according to a Monday report in The Times of India.

"He spoke to us very often over the phone," his father, Sitaram Mahato, was quoted as saying. "But never had he communicated any sense of threat to his life."

(Staff writer Anne Blythe contributed to this story.)