At N.C. State University next week, students will wear baby blue -- not generally a popular color in Raleigh -- as a tribute to Eve Carson, the UNC-Chapel Hill student body president killed last week.

"Everybody knows that N.C. State fans hate Carolina Blue," said Zach Adams, NCSU's senior class president. "So the idea is to really show support by looking beyond our rivalry to something much bigger."

NCSU students will be urged to attend the memorial Tuesday at UNC-CH as well. It is scheduled for 4 p.m. at the Dean E. Smith Center.

A tribute for Carson also was held prior to the recent Duke-UNC-CH men's basketball game at Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Carson's violent death was a jolt of reality not only in Chapel Hill, but around the Triangle, where college students generally don't think so much about their safety. At NCSU, where police are investigating two robberies reported earlier this week, Adams said students see incidents such as Carson's murder as isolated events.

Carson was killed less than two months after Duke graduate student Abhijit Mahato was found shot dead in his off-campus apartment in Durham. The disclosure Thursday that those two murders may have a link caught many by surprise.

Laurence Lovette, 17, one of two men charged Wednesday with Carson's murder, was charged a day later with Mahato's murder. At Duke, the Mahato killing and two armed robberies near campus already had people on edge.

"It automatically sends an institution into a tizzy," said John Burness, a Duke spokesman. "We tend to be very open communities. It shakes an institution."

Durham police already had charged Stephen Lavance Oates, 19, with Mahato's murder, and Burness said he was unaware that anyone else might have been involved.

That link also surprised Madu Majumder, a friend of Mahato and a fellow native of the Indian state of Bengal. Mahato's killing shocked the local Bengali community, Majumder said. News that one of his killers may have struck again was similarly devastating, she said.

"I wish this guy had been caught after Abhijit was killed so that poor girl, Eve Carson, would be alive today," Majumder said.