HILLSBOROUGH - Closing arguments are set for Monday in the trial of Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr., the 21-year-old Durham man who passed on his option to take the stand in his defense.

Prosecutors trying Lovette on charges that he kidnapped, robbed and murdered Eve Carson, the 2008 UNC student body president, rested their case Thursday afternoon in Orange County Superior Court.

Judge Allen Baddour rejected a motion for dismissal of the case by the defense.

The jury is likely to get the case Monday afternoon and begin deliberations that will determine the fate of Lovette, one of two men accused of murdering Carson.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers worked with Baddour Friday to fine-tune instructions he will read to the jury before they go behind closed doors to deliberate.

Lovette is accused of kidnapping Carson and murdering her in the pre-dawn hours of March 5, 2008.

The accomplished student leader was found shot to death, with four handgun wounds to her buttocks, arm, shoulder and cheek, and a shotgun blast in her temple.

Prosecutors contend Lovette fired the first four shots, inflicting wounds the medical examiner said would not have been immediately fatal.

DeMario Atwater, 25, pleaded guilty last year to kidnapping, carjacking, robbing and murdering Carson.

Prosecutors contend he fired the immediately fatal blast from the shotgun.

Lovette pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.

His defense team presented no evidence in the case. Lovette's lawyers maintain that key witnesses for the prosecution - acquaintances of Atwater and Lovette who have had their own brushes with law enforcement - have "bias" and "motive" to implicate their client.

Throughout their cross-examination for the past seven days, the defense team of Karen Bethea-Shields and Kevin Bradley have asked questions of witnesses about whether they or others might have been at the crime scene.

Bethea-Shields said in her opening statement that no forensic evidence would link Lovette to the murder.

But testimony from Atwater's girlfriend and others link him to a handgun that investigators found broken up in Durham that matches bullets found in Carson's body.

Investigators found DNA on the driver's side paneling of Carson's Toyota Highlander that matched Lovette, according to testimony.

Lovette's cell phone was in Chapel Hill, about three-tenths of a mile from Carson's home a half hour before prosecutors contend she was abducted, according to cell phone records introduced this week by the FBI and Verizon representatives.

Prosecutors say Lovette is pictured in surveillance camera images in the driver's seat of Carson's Highlander, reaching toward an ATM machine where her card was used shortly before her death.

The prosecution's last witness Thursday afternoon was an SBI agent who reviewed enhanced images from the surveillance camera footage.

James M. Trevillian, an agent with the SBI for 19 years, said he could see two people in the back seat of Carson's Highlander.

Prosecutors contend Carson was abducted shortly after 3:30 a.m. March 5 from her Friendly Lane home.

They argue that Lovette and an accomplice forced her into the backseat of her Highlander and drove her to ATMs in Chapel Hill and Durham, where they forced the withdrawal of $1,400 - her daily limit - before shooting her to death with a handgun and shotgun in the middle of a dark and quiet street about a mile from her home.

A 20-year-old man testified earlier this week that Lovette told him hours before his arrest that Atwater had forced Carson into the back seat of her Highlander, and as the pair drove her from ATM to ATM, she prayed and pleaded for her life, asking her abductors to pray with her.