Lovette found not guilty in Mahato murder

Laurence Lovette has been found not guilty in the 2008 murder of Duke graduate student Abhijit Mahato, local news outlets are reporting.

Lovette is already serving a life sentence for the murder of Eve Carson, who was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's student body president when she was killed in March 2008.

Mahato was shot and killed Jan. 18, 2008 in his apartment on Anderson Street—less than two miles from West Campus. Lovette was arrested two months later and was charged with armed robbery and first-degree murder. The jury announced a verdict of not guilty Wednesday morning.

Mahato was 29 years old at the time of his death, an international student from India studying computational mechanics. He has been memorialized with the Abhijit Mahato Memorial Fellowship, which gives financial support to an international engineering student each year.