The opening of the trial of Laurence Alvin Lovette last week re-opened the scars left by the murder of Eve Carson more than three years ago.

Hearing the testimony from the first days of the trial casts us back, with stark clarity, to that terrible March 2008, when first we learned that an unidentified young woman had been found shot to death on a quiet residential street, and then, during the course of the ensuing days, learned who she was and followed the course of the investigation and the eventual arrest of two suspects.

We watched all of it with a sick sense of anguish for the loss, as the university and the wider community poured out their hearts during those days and weeks.

The violent death of anyone, especially any young person and especially at the deliberate hands of another, is tragic.

In this case, the horror was compounded by the limitless future of the one who was taken; the murderers, apparently by mere chance, had chosen as their victim the UNC student body president, one of the most vivid, brilliant and positive young lives in our community.

What she did in just 22 years was remarkable. What she might have done with a full lifetime's worth, we can only imagine.

We watched, too, with a profound admiration for strength and dignity with which her family bore the worst conceivable loss.

The trial that began last week brought it all back, and in more chilling detail than ever. District Attorney Jim Woodall and witnesses including some of Carson's friends and roommates filled in some of the gaps in what we know about her last days, and her terrifying last hours.

Carson spent her last few days doing the sorts of things she always did, and there's something heartbreaking about the very ordinariness of those happy activities. She attended a UNC fan appreciation event two nights earlier at which attendees were given paper wristbands bearing the words "Be True." She and a roommate made a bet over who could wear the wristband longer. Carson still had it on when her body was found.

The night before she died she met a friend at a Carolina basketball game and mentioned that she had a lot of studying and work to do afterward.

That's what she was doing at her home several hours later, when, according to Woodall, Lovette and DeMario Atwater appeared out of the darkness.

Prosecutors say they forced her into her own car, a Toyota Highlander, drove her to a Bank of America on Willow Drive and used her bank card to withdraw $700 from her account; a chilling ATM surveillance photo shows a man at the wheel and an indistinct figure that prosecutors think is Carson in the back seat.

Numerous further attempts were made to withdraw money from her account. Shortly after 5 a.m., Carson was found dead on a neighborhood street not far from her home.

Atwater pled guilty and is serving a life sentence. Lovette's trial has revived the terrible memories of that spring three years ago.

If there's anything positive to take away from this, it's that those memories also reawaken our thoughts of Carson's bright spirit, and our determination to keep that light alive by carrying some part of it in ourselves.