DUBAI: Absolute shock. They are the only words that come to mind when Dubai stud-ent Ghiath Barakat thinks of his cousin, now dead after a North Carolina shooting.
“He was a peace-loving person whose main message was tolerance and understanding for everyone,” Barakat told Gulf News. Twenty-three Deah Barakat, his wife Yosur Abu Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan Abu Salha, 19, were victims of a triple murder in their apartment in Chapel Hill on Tuesday night.
Their murders near the campus of the University of North Carolina have sparked an intense debate over whether the victims’ religion played a role in their deaths.
Police said that initial indications suggested the shooting stemmed from “an ongoing neighbour 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. And that’s a sentiment that was echoed by Ghiath in an exclusive interview with Gulf News.
Mourning the loss of his second-cousin, Ghiath recalled his childhood memories with Deah during family summer visits to Syria.
Ghiath, who last spoke to Deah two months ago, described him as “a generous and faithful person who went out of his way to help people.” “He spent all his free time — when he wasn’t studying — on community work and being of service to others. He met strangers with a hug,” said Ghiath.
‘Model family’
Describing his family as an ideal “model family,” Ghiath said that despite the ongoing investigations and their outcome, family members believe the murder was a hate crime. “They wouldn’t call it a hate crime if there wasn’t more to the story,” he said.
Ghiath pointed out that due to the unrest in Syria, he had not seen his cousin in three years as family members had not been able to fly back home for their summer vacations.
“I did not get the chance to meet Deah’s wife because the wedding was around a month ago, and I couldn’t make it.”
He referred to Deah’s last tweet that read, “It’s so freaking sad to hear people saying we should ‘kill Jews’ or ‘Kill Palestinians’. As if that’s going to solve anything.”
“Deah’s main message was tolerance for everyone. Let’s continue spreading that message, and not overreact in ways that would dishonour his memory,” he said.
As word of the shooting spread, so did unease at the possibility that the three were targeted for their religion. The hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter became a common refrain on Twitter as users expressed sorrow and anger at the possibility that the crime was religiously motivated as well as frustrations with what they saw as the media’s failure to initially or thoroughly report what had happened.
The three victims were all young adults with ties to universities in the region, and two of them had got married just six weeks earlier: Barakat was a second-year student at the University of North Carolina’s School of Dentistry; his wife was set to enrol there in the autumn. The third victim was 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. “They were all-American kids, just ordinary kids.”
That’s a sentiment Ghiath can fully relate to over his dead cousin. “That’s who Deah is, since childhood, a generous and loving soul, he never stopped giving and serving,” he told Gulf News.
Turned himself in
Police have 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.
“Our investigators are exploring what could have motivated 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 over parking.
The father of Yusor and Razan Mohammad Abu Salha said on 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 said.
‘Gun in his belt’
“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.”
Hicks frequently criticised religion in his social-media postings. In a news conference on Wednesday, Hicks’s wife insisted that the shooting happened because of arguments over parking and not because of bigotry.
“I can say with my absolute belief that this incident had nothing to do with religion or [the] victims’ faith but in fact was related to the long-standing parking disputes that my husband had with the neighbours,” Karen Hicks said.
