Senior criminal justice major Heather Belmore avoids walking down the stretch of Columbus Avenue between Ruggles and Coventry Street.

On Jan. 15, 1990, her brother, Mark, was stabbed to death by a group of four teenagers on an adjacent side street. Police concluded they had no prior motive.

Belmore, who was 12 at the time, said she refused to let her brother’s death haunt her. But now, as one of the killers faces a parole hearing, she has again been reminded and frustrated by the death of her brother.

Larry Robinson, who has been serving a 15-years-to-life sentence since 1990, will not only ask for his release before a state parole board today, but will be legally represented by a student from Northeastern.

Upon hearing the news, Belmore, 27, a Walpole native, said her family was “shocked.”

“This is a slap in the face to my family,” she said. “It’s like spitting on my brother’s grave.”

The law school student who will represent the killer has been dispatched from the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic, a community service branch that gives students practice in legal defense by providing free representation for prisoners who are up for parole and cannot afford a lawyer.

Wallace Holohan, a law school professor who directs the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic, said the name of the student providing representation was confidential. The student will be under the supervision of two faculty members, according to clinic policy.

According to a statement released by the university, those involved in the case did not realize Belmore had been a Northeastern student until last Wednesday, when the law student began to work with Robinson.

The university had already sent a letter to the Massachusetts Parole Board, who will decide Robinson’s fate, encouraging the board to deny parole.

“As an institution of higher learning, Northeastern recognizes that faculty and students are free to take positions that are different from or even opposed to the university’s official position, according to the release. In doing so, they speak for themselves and not the university,” the statement said, referring to the law school’s interest versus that espoused by upper administration.

“To allow one of his murderers to walk free in this community would be an affront to the memory of Mark Belmore, to his family, who must deal with their grief every day and to every law-abiding member of the Northeastern University community,” read the letter, which was authored by Vice President and University Counsel Vincent Lembo.

Now, though, university officials say the clinic cannot rescind the legal representation it agreed to provide to Robinson in good moral standing.

“Had the clinic known [the law student would be representing the killer of a Northeastern student], they never would have taken the case,” said university spokesperson Laura Shea. “They felt they had an ethical responsibility to see the case through.”

Shea said this was the first time in the clinic’s 25-year history a case has come up with what she called “potential conflicts of interest.”

“It wasn’t red-flagged because it was the first time it happened,” she said. “Within the university, there are many centers of decision making that exist. The case never made its way to us until law school officials told us,” she said.

For the family, though, that doesn’t mean the conflict of interest is any less severe.

Belmore said Northeastern has always been supportive of her family since her brother’s death, making it even less understandable why a “conflict of interest,” as she called the situation, would spring up now.

“I don’t understand why another school couldn’t have taken it on,” she said. “We don’t understand how the school had no idea he was a Northeastern student.”

The stabbing of Belmore, who was a 19-year-old sophomore with aspirations of becoming an FBI agent, shocked the campus, setting off a series of questions about the vulnerability of students at a campus on the edge of Roxbury.

Robinson, then a juvenile who had previously been arrested on charges of assault and battery with a deadly weapon, jumped Belmore along with three friends as he was walking to a friend’s house along Blackwood Avenue. They beat him and stabbed him 22 times, according to police reports.

Robinson later turned himself in, and has been held in custody ever since.

Belmore said she remembers hearing of her brother’s death “very vividly.”

She said both her choice of college and major have helped her to cope with his death.

“My brother was a [criminal justice] major, so I just became interested in it after he was killed,” she said.

John Belmore, Heather and Mark’s father, said he was also “disappointed” in the university’s handling of the case.

“If the university sent a letter to the parole board opposing his parole, it seems like a conflict of interest to me,” said Belmore, who still lives in Walpole and visits his son’s grave regularly.

He said this issue was particularly taking a toll on his daughter.

“It affects [my wife and I], but it really affects her because she is a student there,” he said Monday. “I don’t know how she keeps up what she does.”