Police on Wednesday said that initial indications suggested the shooting stemmed from “an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking,” an assertion that was echoed by the suspected shooter’s wife. But relatives of the victims insisted that the incident should be viewed as a hate crime, while the fact that three Muslims were killed in a single shooting drew international attention to a relatively quiet college town.
The three victims were identified by police and school officials in the early hours of Wednesday morning. They were all young adults with ties to universities in the region, two of whom had gotten married just six weeks earlier: Deah Barakat, 23, was a second-year student at the University of North Carolina’s School of Dentistry; his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, was set to enroll there in the fall. The third victim was her 19-year-old sister, Razan, a student at nearby North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
“They were angels, just wonderful, beautiful people,” Ayoub Ouederni, vice president of the UNC Muslim Student Association, said Wednesday. “They were all-American kids, just ordinary kids.”
Also early Wednesday morning, police said they had arrested and charged Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, with three counts of murder. Hicks turned himself in to the Chatham County Sheriff’s Office in nearby Pittsboro after the shooting.
The shooting deaths of three Muslims prompted concerns that the violence was motivated by their religion, and leading Muslim civil rights advocates called for police to address that possible explanation. But the Chapel Hill Police Department said it appeared, at least initially, that the shooting centered on a parking argument, while also promising to see if religion was a factor in the killings.
“Our investigators are exploring what could have motivated Mr. Hicks to commit such a senseless and tragic act,” Chris Blue, the Chapel Hill police chief, said in a statement. “We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case.”
Family members of the victims disputed the idea that it was simply an argument involving parking. The father of two of the victims said Wednesday that one of his daughters had previously told her family about Hicks having a problem with the way she looked.
“It was execution style, a bullet in every head,” Mohammad Abu-Salha, a psychiatrist in nearby Clayton, N.C., told the News and Observer in Raleigh. “This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime. This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt. And they were uncomfortable with him, but they did not know he would go this far.”
Barakat’s sister on Wednesday asked that authorities investigate the three “senseless and heinous murders” as a hate crime.
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