By Mustafa Caglayan
CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina
Thousands of mourners gathered Thursday at the athletics field of North Carolina State University in Raleigh to honor the lives of the three Muslim students who were shot dead at their home earlier this week.
But the most affected by the tragedy have been the ones who were closest to the youths.
Deah Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, were fatally shot Tuesday in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Their next door neighbor Craig Stephen Hicks surrendered to police after the attack and has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
Authorities said the triple homicide may have been motivated by "an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking," but the victims' religion, as well as alleged comments the shooter made online, fueled broad speculation that the murders were a hate crime.
Ismail Mohareb, a close relative of Deah, is one of those who find it difficult to attribute the killings to a parking dispute.
"That is not true," he told the Anadolu Agency. "Because over the past year Deah lived there, he and his neighbor had never had problems until his wife moved in. His wife wore the hijab, which is a clear distinction of her being a Muslim."
Deah and Yusor were a newly-wed couple. They married in December 2014.
"That is when the problems started," Mohareb said. "So, whoever speaks of parking spot does not know what they are talking about. This was clearly because they said 'Ashadu an la ilaha illa-llah' (the Islamic declaration of belief in Allah) and because they were Muslims."
Addressing the crowd at the funeral, Mohammad Yousif Abu-Salha, father of the two murdered sisters, said religious intolerance had fueled the shootings.
"This has hate crime all over it and I am not going to sit down," he said.
"Please involve the FBI. Please investigate," he said, adding that it was "about protecting all the other children in the USA."
The FBI on Thursday night announced it had launched “a parallel preliminary inquiry to determine whether or not any federal laws were violated related to the case.”
A perceived lack of coverage in the wake of the murders by the U.S. media led to a massive social media campaign, with many users posting pictures of the victims using the hashtags #ChapelHillShooting, which has been used hundreds of thousands times since the incident. The hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter has also been used extensively; it is a reference to the rallying call of protesters in the wake of high-profile killings of unarmed black men by police.
The incident and subsequent reactions have also drawn international condemnations, with, for instance, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticizing the U.S. leadership for not having made any statement about the murders.
'Selfless' lives
Deah was a second-year student at the University of North Carolina’s School of Dentistry, and Yusor was planning to join her husband at the same school in the fall. Razan was majoring in design at North Carolina State University, where Deah and Yusor had previously graduated.
They spearheaded campaigns to help the homeless in their community and raised funds to help Muslims around the world.
Deah was raising money on YouCaring.com, an online fundraiser site, to provide dental relief to Syrian refugees in Turkey.
His relative, Ismail Mohareb, said they went on many road trips together to play in basketball tournaments.
"He was never mean to anybody. Even if you played against him in basketball, at the end of the game he would come, shake your hand, tell you 'good game'," he said. "And if you were on his team, you were like his brother. He did so much for the community. He was always at the masjid (mosque)."
Radwa Behairy, a close friend of Deah and Yusor, told the Anadolu Agency that the life of the couple was "all about volunteering" and that they were a "perfect match" for each other.
"They were beautiful people. Everything about them was selfless, very ambitious," she said.
She said Deah "took time out of his days to teach me things that I needed help with, and he never hesitated to reach out and help everybody."
