The Story of a Hate Crime
Two summers ago, Deah Barakat and his roommate, Imad Ahmad, were moving into a condominium complex in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when another resident stopped by. He was a burly forty-four-year-old named Craig Hicks, and he was intent on underlining the parking rules: spaces were limited to one for the resident and one for a guest. Barakat and Ahmad said that they got it, and continued unpacking.
Barakat, who was six feet three, athletic, and outgoing, was too focussed on his future to concern himself with cranky neighbors. That fall, he was starting dental school at the University of North Carolina, and he was engaged to Yusor Abu-Salha, an undergraduate at North Carolina State. Fine-boned and slender with wide-set eyes, Abu-Salha wore the hijab, and, like Barakat, she had grown up in an observant Muslim family. Barakat’s parents were immigrants from Syria; Abu-Salha’s were Palestinians who had lived in Kuwait and Jordan. Yet the couple didn’t see themselves as much different from other New Southerners in the Research Triangle area: Barakat avidly followed “SportsCenter” and country music; Abu-Salha was a fan of Call of Duty.
Barakat and Ahmad first met in middle school, playing basketball on Friday nights at a gym connected to the Islamic Association of Raleigh, the local mosque. Ahmad was now studying for a Ph.D. in chemistry at U.N.C. When he got home, Barakat often greeted him with a hug. “I’d never been a huggy kind of guy,” Ahmad recalled recently, but he came to appreciate it. The roommates watched basketball together and often made bets; the loser had to prepare a meal. Ahmad once cooked Bourbon chicken (without the alcohol), but Barakat usually just served his favorite food: cereal.
As Barakat advanced in his studies, he began leaning toward pediatric dentistry; his adviser was researching what makes some children cavity-prone, and Barakat had a knack for coaxing jumpy toddlers into a dentist’s chair. It helped that he had a childlike streak himself. He loved pranks, and made a point of sticking the windshield wipers up every time he walked past his roommate’s car. He knew all the words to “Let It Go,” from “Frozen.” Although Barakat was twenty-three, he still stopped by his old grammar school—Al-Iman, a private institution in Raleigh that offered “an Islamic environment”—to say hello to Mussarut Jabeen, the principal. Jabeen is on the short side, and Barakat sometimes greeted her by walking up behind her and gently placing his hand on her head. She was delighted to learn that Barakat was planning to marry Abu-Salha, another Al-Iman graduate. “You will be together for the rest of your lives, inshallah,” Jabeen said.
Barakat was one of three siblings, the oldest of whom, Suzanne, is a resident in family medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She recalled being “the bossy one,” who’d make her brothers solve multiplication problems while they sock-skated across the living-room floor. As “a first-generation kid,” she said, she was “the guinea pig, figuring out how the education system worked here.” Whenever she was feeling anxious, though, Barakat could disarm her: “He’d be kind of goofy and lighthearted and say, ‘Sanny, I love you.’ Then I wasn’t stressed out anymore.”
Barakat’s equanimity was tested by Craig Hicks, his neighbor. Every month or so, Hicks came by to complain that visitors were parking in the spaces designated for him and his wife, Karen, a nurse-practitioner. Once, he pulled up his shirt to reveal a holstered gun at his belt. Instead of escalating the conflict, Barakat got a map of the parking lot, highlighted the permissible spaces, and distributed the map to friends and family. Ahmad told me that Hicks’s behavior had sometimes unsettled him, but Barakat had always been a “calming factor—he’d say, ‘Look, this guy’s smart enough not to do anything.’ ”
One evening last October, Abu-Salha and several friends played Risk at the condo with Barakat and Ahmad. After Abu-Salha’s friends left, Hicks knocked on the door. He was “abrasive and yelling,” Ahmad told me. “He said, ‘You were too loud—you woke up my wife.’ And he flashed his gun. Deah told him, ‘O.K., we’ll make sure our friends aren’t so loud next time.’ But afterward I was cleaning up with Yusor and Deah, and I was scared. And I could see that Yusor was, too.”
Barakat and Abu-Salha were married last December, at a Marriott in Raleigh. Four hundred guests came. Abu-Salha’s four closest friends were in the bridal party. Together, they called themselves the Fab Five; they had grown up attending the Raleigh mosque, and four of them had gone to Al-Iman. They remained close after moving on to public high schools.
Abu-Salha thrived at Athens Drive High School—she became an editor of the student newspaper, the Oracle, and her hijab was sometimes in the school colors, blue and orange. But most of her socializing after class was with the Fab Five. The girls helped one another stay connected to their Muslim beliefs. They had typical high-school fun, minus the drinking and dating: they drove around with Nicki Minaj cranked up; they cruised the mall and tried on platform sandals that they didn’t buy. Abu-Salha enlisted her friends to watch horror films with her so that they could laugh off the scary parts. Although the girls sometimes felt that people stared at their head scarves, they had all been happy growing up in Raleigh. One of the friends, Rana Odeh, told me, “I love my sweet tea and football as much as anybody. But at the same time I appreciate that it’s very diverse in this part of the South.”
The girlfriends reunited at N.C. State. Abu-Salha majored in biology, and, like Barakat, she began contemplating dental school. Last summer, she travelled with her mother to Kilis, in southern Turkey, where she volunteered at a dental clinic for Syrian refugees. Othman Shibly, a dentist who helped start the first such clinics, told me, “You see mostly women and children. They might have terrible infections or had their front teeth knocked out by the butt of a soldier’s rifle.” Abu-Salha told her friends that, though it had been hard witnessing children in abject conditions, she now knew that dentistry was for her.
Abu-Salha could seem shy, but in the spring of 2014 she surprised many people by auditioning, with Odeh, to be an m.c. of N.C. State’s annual Muslim Students Association night—a variety show that attracted hundreds of people. “There’s that stereotype that girls aren’t funny,” Odeh said. “But we were, like, ‘No—we’re the funniest people ever!’ ” They got the gig, and that night they strode onto the stage like seasoned hosts, wearing black-and-white neckties. “We riffed on that Jimmy Fallon–Justin Timberlake routine about hashtags,” Odeh recalled. “We made fun of U.N.C. We had such a good time.”
In college, Abu-Salha and Barakat became a couple. He’d also grown up in Raleigh, where his father, Namee, owned several businesses, including a gas-station minimart and a small trucking company. (Abu-Salha’s father, a psychiatrist, had his own practice, which he ran with the help of his wife.) At N.C. State, Abu-Salha and her friends had worked with Barakat on volunteer projects: feeding the homeless, organizing a health fair.
Abu-Salha told her girlfriends that Barakat had approached her and her family to ask if he could get to know her properly—which meant, in Islamic terms, in the presence of at least one other person. Her younger sister, Razan, began accompanying the couple on excursions, and Abu-Salha encouraged her friends to chat with Barakat in a group texting thread. In one exchange, Barakat playfully insisted that Abu-Salha looked like the glamorous basketball player Candace Parker. One of the friends, Amira Ata, told me that the girls had each texted Barakat a long riff “about how much we love Yusor.” Ata was impressed when “he responded to every sentence. A lot of guys would’ve said, basically, ‘Yeah.’ We wouldn’t have approved of a lot of guys even in our community. We approved of Deah.” In February, 2013, the Barakat and Abu-Salha families announced that Deah and Yusor were engaged.
For her bridal shower, Abu-Salha wore a sparkly ice-blue dress modelled on one worn by Elsa, the princess in “Frozen.” On her wedding day, she wore a high-necked gown with a beaded white hijab. “Though your hair does add to your beauty, Yusor made it work,” Odeh recalled. Most of the music was Arabic, but at one point the women went to a separate room, and a female d.j. played one of the rap songs that Abu-Salha loved. She removed her head scarf, and Barakat came in to watch her dance. With her arms swaying above her head, she made the mean-mug expression that always cracked her friends up, then broke into a radiant smile.
After the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon, in Mazatlán, Abu-Salha left her parents’ house and moved into the apartment in Chapel Hill. (Ahmad had found a new place.) She had graduated from N.C. State a semester early and been accepted at U.N.C.’s dental school. She planned to join her husband there in the fall of 2015.
Their apartment was in a shingle-roofed building overlooking woods. They had a grill on the patio and a plaque bearing the phrase “Praise Be to Allah” by the front door. Abu-Salha’s friends and her sister, Razan, often came over. So did Imad Ahmad, who was visiting when Abu-Salha cooked the first meal of her married life: chicken parmigiana.
The condominium complex, called Finley Forest, was built in the nineteen-eighties. Originally inhabited mainly by working people, it had become an enclave for graduate students. Though they were not prone to wild parties, they weren’t quiet enough for Craig Hicks.
Most of the young residents of Finley Forest were on an upward arc in life. Hicks was not. In the mid-aughts, he had been laid off from a job as an auto-parts salesman. After working for a few years at the deli counter of a Harris Teeter, he was taking classes at Durham Tech Community College, in the hope of becoming a paralegal. Karen was his third wife. He was no longer in contact with a twenty-year-old daughter from his first marriage. He’d recently received a summons to appear in court and pay fourteen thousand dollars in child support for his other daughter, who was ten.
On Facebook, Hicks presented himself as a libertarian gun enthusiast and an “anti-theist” who wanted “religion to go away.” In one post, he wrote, “The moment that your religion claims any kind of jurisdiction over my experience, you insult me on a level that you can’t even begin to comprehend. Even if your beliefs had substance, the arrogance of that would be insult enough. But the fact that they have no substance, and are merely a transparent raft of delusions and lies, magnifies the insult enormously.”
Source: www.newyorker.com