‘Mark has... his innocence back.’ Murder charge dropped in UNCC student’s killing
Gaston County’s notorious murder case against Mark Carver is no more.
This week, District Attorney Travis Page quietly filed a motion to dismiss the 13-year-old charge against Carver, which dates back to the discovery of Irina Yarmolenko’s body along the banks of the Catawba River near Mount Holly. The UNC Charlotte sophomore was 20. Investigators say she had been strangled.
Carver was convicted of her killing. He spent 10 years in prison before being released in 2019 when his conviction was overturned.
Now the case against him has been dropped.
“Upon a retesting and re-examination of the physical evidence, there is no longer sufficient DNA evidence to support the charge,” Page wrote in his motion.
Defense attorney Chris Mumma said her client had been victimized by an inadequate and biased investigation as well as the prosecution led by Page’s predecessor, the now-retired Locke Bell. Mumma said she first asked for a retesting of the DNA evidence in the case as far back as 2014
“This took far too long, but Mark has his name and innocence back” Mumma told The Charlotte Observer on Friday. “We hoped from the beginning that there would be an objective and professional investigation to the determine the true perpetrator’s of Ira’s murder.
“They went down the wrong road from the beginning.”
Carver, a Gaston County resident, and his cousin were fishing downstream around the time Yarmolenko’s body was discovered. Both were charged in the killing. The cousin died of a heart attack in 2010 shortly before his trial. Carver was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to a mandatory life imprisonment.
His guilt has long been disputed. In 2016, the Observer published “Death by the River,” a six-part series that raised questions about Carver’s conviction, the evidence used against him, and the defense he received at his trial.
GO DEEPER: Read the special report on Mark Carver and Ira Yarmolenko
In her years of appeals, Mumma, executive director of the North Carolina Center for Actual Innocence, homed in on the “touch DNA” found on Yarmolenko’s car, which prosecutors used to tie Carver to the scene.
She long argued that the DNA would not stand up to modernized testing. The improved testing was widely used by forensic investigators in most of the country at the time of the Carver investigation, but not by the N.C. crime laboratory.
Carver’s original defense team did not present a case at the trial. Mumma said the jury should have heard about his extremely low IQ and extensive physical disabilities that made it unlikely he could have killed Yarmolenko.
The attorneys also did not challenge the DNA evidence presented by the state. More than a decade later, Page has verified that it was inadequate.
Man’s conviction overturned in murder of UNC Charlotte student near Catawba River
Despite Bell’s insistence of Carver’s guilt, the case had been slowly crumbling for years. In 2019, Superior Court Judge Christopher Bragg threw out Carver’s conviction and ordered a new trial.
The ruling sent the case back to Gaston County. Bell, who refused to retest the DNA, had long pledged to retry Carver if his conviction did not stand. But he retired in June 2021, leaving Page to decide what would happen next.
His decision became public on Friday, days before an Aug. 16 court hearing on Mumma’s motion calling for the charges against her client to be dropped.
