Mohammad Abu-Salha, the father of one of the Muslim women who were shot and killed near a North Carolina campus, said the suspect Craig Stephen Hicks was filled with hate and had previously menaced his daughter.
Tuesday, three Muslim college students — Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23; his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21; and her sister, Razan Abu-Salha — were shot in the head, execution style. Mr. Hicks, 46, has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder after he turned himself in to Chapel Hill police.
Initial reports indicated Mr. Hicks and the three, who were all neighbors, had engaged in angry discussions about parking spaces, though police weren’t confirming that the cause of the shootings was rooted in that reason.
Now Mr. Abu-Salha has come forward and said Mr. Hicks had previously bothered his daughter and that she had told him she was distraught at his treatment.
“It was execution-style, a bullet in every head,” he said in an interview with the Raleigh News-Observer. “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.”
He then said his daughter — who lived right next door to Mr. Hicks — told his family a week before her death: “Honest to God, [Hicks] hates us for what we are and how we look,” Fox News reported.
Authorities are still holding back on calling the shootings a hate crime.
“This obviously is a very new investigation,” U.S. Attorney Ripley Rand told reporters at a press conference, Fox News reported. “The events … are not part of a targeting campaign against Muslims in North Carolina. [There is] no information this is part of an organized event against Muslims. This appears, at this point, to be an isolated incident.”
Some American-Muslim groups, meanwhile, have said that the killings have all the look of a religious-based attack.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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