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A North Carolina man has filed a civil lawsuit against a city government and law enforcement officials who he claims used faulty evidence against him during an investigation into the 2008 murder of a University of North Carolina student.

Mark Carver claims the city of Mount Holly, North Carolina, as well as an assistant district attorney and multiple law enforcement officials involved with the investigation used his intellectual disabilities against him to convict him in the killing of Irina Yarmolenko in May 2008.

"The State's evidence was fabricated, misleading, and used in reckless disregard of the plaintiff's constitutional rights." Joshua Snow Kendrick, Carver's attorney, said in the complaint. "The DNA evidence was faulty and would not have been used against Carver without North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation's crime lab leadership and staff acting in reckless disregard of national standards for the interpretation of DNA mixture evidence."

Carver claims that members of the Mount Holly police department, Gaston County police and district attorney's offices, and North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation made errors when investigating the Yarmolenko murder that led to his conviction.

The lawsuit specifically points to DNA evidence that Carver claims was incorrectly collected, as well as reliance on Carver's testimony after he was subjected to deliberately difficult questioning despite police knowing that he was intellectually disabled and was illiterate and "easily manipulated," the lawsuit said.

Carver was fishing with his cousin, Neal Cassada, the day in May 2008 when Yarmolenko was found dead on the banks of the Catawba River. It was only after the pair left and saw a local news report that they realized they were in the vicinity of the body, the lawsuit said.

Carver realized he had left a fishing net near the scene and returned to retrieve it, the lawsuit claims. Once he arrived he began speaking with law enforcement, and provided a statement to investigators.

The lawsuit claims that absent a motive or any connection to the victim, police called Carver in for questioning five months after discovering Yarmolenko's body in October 2008, and, in addition to asking for DNA swabs, began interrogating Carver.

The lawsuit claims police posed deliberately confusing and misleading questions to Carver and Cassada, in one instance lying to Cassada by saying Carver had implicated him in the crime and that his DNA was found on the victim's nearby car. The lawsuit does not specify whether Carver or Cassada had attorneys present during the interrogations.

Carver and Cassada maintained their innocence, with Carver claiming that due to carpal tunnel and radial tunnel injuries he would be physically unable to commit the crime. Law enforcement claimed DNA evidence was present at the scene that could connect Carver and Cassada to the crime, however.

The lawsuit claims, however, that the DNA evidence was poorly collected by law enforcement, and that a report from the state crime lab was unable to definitively tie either suspect to the crime scene.

Law enforcement sent bad DNA samples to crime lab investigators, the lawsuit says, and the low-quality samples were missing key DNA signatures that should have been used to positively match Carver. DNA results from the state lab "could not exclude" Carver from the sample, but no positive match was made, the lawsuit said.

Carver was arrested on the faulty information and the lawsuit claims that an assistant district attorney in Gaston County misrepresented the evidence at trial and that as a result he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The sentence would later be overturned in 2012 when a newly elected district attorney in Gaston County revisited the case and dismissed the charges, according to the lawsuit.

Carver is claiming that the wrongful conviction occurred in violation of his Fourth and 14th Amendment rights and is suing for actual and punitive damages against the city as well as the individual law enforcement and government officials involved in the investigation and prosecution.

A spokesperson for either side did not respond to a request for comment.

Carver is represented by Joshua Snow Kendrick of Kendrick & Leonard PC and S. Fredrick Winiker of the Winiker Law Firm PLLC.

Counsel information for the government was not available.

The case is Carver v. City of Mount Holly et al., case number 6:25-cv-00478, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.

--Editing by Linda Voorhis.