--- title: Anatomy of Hate | TIME description: It was a triple-murder fueled by rage—but was it a hate crime? canonical: https://time.com/video/W3XAtgUW/ og:title: Anatomy of Hate og:description: It was a triple-murder fueled by rage—but was it a hate crime? og:url: https://time.com/video/W3XAtgUW/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/W3XAtgUW/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Anatomy of Hate twitter:description: It was a triple-murder fueled by rage—but was it a hate crime? twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/W3XAtgUW/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Anatomy of Hate > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Anatomy of Hate [Watch (HLS stream): Anatomy of Hate](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/W3XAtgUW.m3u8) (29:50)  _Published 2020-02-18. It was a triple-murder fueled by rage—but was it a hate crime?_ --- Oct 13, 2023 4:20 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) ['Empire' Actor Victim of Possible Hate Crime Attack](/video/5mI1eApZ/) ### 'Empire' Actor Victim of Possible Hate Crime Attack [Trump Supporter Arrested on Hate Crime Charges at JFK](/video/8wZq4BtZ/) ### Trump Supporter Arrested on Hate Crime Charges at JFK [Museum of Tolerance: The Story of a Hate Crime](/video/JA8pNIvz/) ### Museum of Tolerance: The Story of a Hate Crime --- ## Transcript Tell us a story about what happened to that. You know what parking is like in Chapel Hill. It's the same people also. I talked to them numerous times. I've said I threatened them. I said I'm sick and tired of screw up. You're going to keep disrespect me. I'm going to start disrespecting you. And if I. Pull back on the story issue to them. February 10th, 2015. I the whole world was watching Chapel Hill and seconds. We knew immediately who killed our children. Shocking triple murder in the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Police say a neighbor gunned down three Muslim college students, 23 year old Deah Barakat, the woman he just married in late December. 21 year old. Yusor Abu Salha also killed her sister, 19 year old Razan. The victim's family members are. Questioning whether the shooting was a hate crime. Who is this man? Someone motivated by hate or someone so obsessed by parking spaces at his condominium that he shoot to kill? Rise. Show me a reason. If it's not hate. No act is singularly motivated. We do a lot of what we do for reasons we are not even aware of ourselves. The question is how did our children live and why did they die in the hole of our own foster mom who has lived in the home? Okay. Doing okay, though? Hi there. I'm walking through the family forest apartment complex in Chapel Hill, and I just heard gunshots. I don't know what building it came from, but I heard said screaming. Okay. It was a gray afternoon. Officers arrived and were able to relay on the radio that this is a really serious crime here. Police tape, yellow tape, sirens, flashing lights, dark nights. Their father was just telling. I want answers. I want to ask Justin if he's dead. And then I froze. I was just walking around looking at people's eyes. My wife, Amaro, was holding her stomach, rocking in her chair and saying, Oh, God, please, no, God, please. Or God or God. My father called me. He said, You sit here. Why did we learn our faith? Your true testament of faith is how you react during times of hardship. He said you, sir, in the hour with your Lord now. I said, Who was the third victim of the shooting? He told me Roseanne was visiting them for dinner. I went to an auction without a bottle and I kept going down and down and down. There is a clock. And I stopped. Took it about three outs and stopped it at 5:06 p.m.. As far as I know, that was the time of the shooting. And for me that is what at that time in my life stopped. Right in an I know, go ahead, keep going. Higher, higher, higher. It is like our baby was born. We're so happy for you and your saw. They just were in love and you could see it in their eyes. They were like role models in our community. I was two years older than you, sir, and four years older than Roseanne. I used to look up to my sisters, although they were younger than me, because I felt that they were better than me in many ways. You saw her name means is, and she sort of radiated a sense of ease. Everywhere she went, you saw got into you and see School of Dentistry where she was going to join the Roseanne was just a giver, the artistic one out of us all. I used to imagine, what are our lives going to be like? Like, are we going to one day share a cul de sac where our kids are playing around? Or sometimes I feel like it's hard to describe him because he's my brother. He was an unconditional friend. Take a picture with me out there. I was very, very smart and very kind, very gentle. Being a mother, it was everything I was. That sense of happiness just isn't possible anymore. The Roseanne's Room. This is the one that she built. It's a lights for her first quarter at the design school. It's really pretty. And it made colors. And this is your sister's wedding dress. She tried many dresses, but when she wore this one. Oh, my God, she looks like an angel. It's a school picture for them. Three together views refuse to share. Everything's with you. So I don't know them. And I know that he now feeling lonely. And get ready. There isn't a textbook outline of how to go through something like this as a family because things like this are not supposed to happen. Things like this could destroy families. Things like this could destroy communities. And I have a lot. Of positive. Wisdom in that. Three Muslim young people murdered in our quaint progressive college community. And those things were very hard to make sense of. Very early in that investigation, we were hearing from residents who had had encounters over parking with Mr. Higgs. Chapel Hill Police were going door to door talking to neighbors. He had issues, a lot of issues with people, noise in the neighborhood and parking issues. Pretty quickly, it became clear to us that that was a source of conflict for him and his neighbors. When there's an usually troubling event, we want to provide reassurance to the community that we believe is isolated and that we don't think there's an ongoing threat because as you can imagine, by 830 or 9:00 the next morning, we were getting inquiries literally from all around the world. We put out an initial statement and it was factual talk named the victim's name, the suspect that he had turned himself in and we were charging him with murder and that our preliminary investigation suggested this interaction developed out of a dispute over parking. We arrested Craig Stephen Hicks, 46 years old, of 270 summer. Walk, circling Chapel Hill. He's been charged with three counts of first degree murder. And he's in the Durham County jail right now. And this is not a federal investigation yet. Pretty quickly, we learned that it didn't have the effect that we hoped it would have. Well, right now you're on Twitter. You can see the hashtag Muslim lives matter, just flooding the feeds, more than. 2 million tweets. Many have already judged this as a hate crime. We've been talking all morning about the rush to call this incredible tragedy an issue over parking. It's basically incomprehensible to me. You have a man who openly despised people of all religious faiths. His Facebook page said he's an ordained atheist minister who enjoys target practice. His post cover everything from condemning religion to showing off his revolver, but also supporting equal rights. His wife says there's no way I. Can say with my absolute belief that this incident had nothing to do. With religion or victim's faith. As soon as I heard the words parking dispute on television, I was very disappointed. Do you live at the apartment complex for a couple of years? And he had several interactions with Craig Hicks. But we believe that those interactions escalated when you saw who wore the headscarf arrived on the scene when she married and moved in. Craig Hicks I think the way he was looking at his neighborhood was that it was changing, it was diversifying. My mom told my sister that she was worried. My father told them, You guys need to go and get a restraining order from the police. And that was their next step. That was what they were working on immediately after the murders. It really wasn't necessarily a time for us to heal. It was a time for us to act. We ask that the authorities investigate these senseless and heinous murders as a hate crime. We don't care about punishment. We care about acknowledging this the way it is. If we classify it as a hate crime and maybe people will start understanding that, that, you know, Islamophobia or or hate or ignorance can can kill. Leaders at this mosque are hoping to meet with federal investigators next week to make their case. They say it's important to them to prevent other Muslims from becoming victims of similar crimes. We really felt like if this murder was classified as a parking dispute, then it's just another example of how aggression even microaggressions against the Muslim community will continue to be underreported, will continue to be kind of swept under the rug because we prefer a more romanticized or more whitewashed version of where we are. I've seen a lot of cases, as you might imagine, over 35 years of being a judge. And I certainly heard cases on the state level in North Carolina that qualify as hate crimes sometimes. It's very clear in this a pernicious type of crime. Texas has executed the white supremacist behind a gruesome hate crime. Three men chain James Byrd. Jr to the back of a truck in June of. 1998. Dragging him nearly three. Miles on a rural road near the Louisiana border. That was a typical hate crime. They did that because it was black. They told everybody they were going to kill him because he was black. That's the kind of hate crime that occurs in many, many places. And what the federal government is trying to protect against. Arguably the first attempts to create something like a hate crime were anti-lynching statutes. Each time they were filibustered by Southern senators. The first true hate crime legislation was passed at the federal level in 1969. That made it a crime to prevent someone from engaging in some sort of activity on account of race, religion or ethnicity. They were designed for the federal government to be able to take a case and prosecute it when a state might not want to. Hate crimes have special, significant harms. You know, if you burn a cross on the lawn of an African-American family's home, the harm doesn't just go to that family. The harm resonates throughout the entire African-American community. Convicting the perpetrator of not just a simple assault, but of a hate crime gives society the chance to sort of stand in solidarity with the victim. States have always been free to define their own hate crimes, but they've only begun to do so relatively recently. In the case of first degree murder. North Carolina's sentencing requires an automatic life without parole. And so in that sense, a hate crime doesn't mean that somebody will get more time. What it will do is give validity to the reason why he did what he did. The challenges in proving a hate crime are that you have to be able to directly attribute an event to someone's intent. You have the right to remain silent if you choose to give up there absent a direct confession of that. It's a difficult standard to meet. We have one spot reserved for death, one life parks an eye for someone else. And no place else to park. It's the same people all the time. I've talked to them numerous times. I've seen them. I threatened them. I walked back there and I said, You got three cars on the lot. You're not supposed to have more than two. And I don't have a parking spot. I'm not parking on a street and he said, We can park. Where can I say the word? Wherever we want. We can park as many fucking vehicles we want. He said that he came over. He knocked the door. He told my brother that he had taken three spots and that somehow that wasn't okay and that my brother started cussing. He said one of the girls berated him as well. As an entire this crowd. You're going to keep disrespecting and start disrespecting me because he was a piece of shit and I will. Because I thought it was possible that a brother and yourself were angry. We're trying to get him to stop coming back or stop harassing them. Had it not been for the video? That's what I thought. There are three things in my life that I will never forget. One was the death of my dad. I was the death of my mom. And the other was that video. All your mind does is hear the screams. I've just never heard the desperation and the surprise. But mostly the fear. So got three cars in a parking spot. Now, I mean, we can have our beauty partners, but we can have. You're going to be disrespectful towards me. I'm not going to get on the. You see Greg Hicks standing over my brother's body. Your son resigned, was shot with the gun to their job at point blank. On the way out, he again stood over my brother. This time he shot him in the mouth. It's a basic human instinct to try and make some sort of meaning, some sort of sense out of a terrible crime. anti-Muslim bias was and continues to be a huge problem in our society. But it's also possible he was simply a terribly angry man who allowed his anger to build and build and build. And then he might have killed them irrespective of their religion. I still see their faces when I killed them, all three of them six months prior to this event. Some broken me. I knew I was over the edge and I knew that temper. Mine was ready to come out and I knew I was not going to able to control it. Somewhere along Circle was very quiet. It was very organized. With the recession, a lot of people moved out. The people who were moving in were all college students, and they don't really know how to follow rules. Are that great? That morning I woke up. I went to school, came home and found our cars and didn't have a parking spot. I decided they were going to be the ones. They were going to move their cars out a lot or else had nothing to do with religion. I don't like religion. I'm not quiet about that. But I didn't kill them because of their religion. Don't blame this crime on a whatever race. Agnostic and atheist. Blame it on Craig Hicks. I did that crime. People are call me a monster. I'm beyond that in my own mind. I'm well beyond that. There's the story about fish swimming through water and older fish says, How's the water? How's the water? And the big fish are like, What water? And they're not even aware of this environment that they're immersed in because they've been in this environment all their lives. The nation's experience with 911, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, those things all become part of the water through which we're all swimming. That's going to create biases that many people won't even really be fully aware of. Growing up, you always felt a little bit different. Here. You're the Muslim. Especially post 911, you're synonymous with almost enemy of America. Like your loyalties are conflicted. I went to medical school in Iraq, so I survived the Iraqi Irani war for three years. We could hear the sounds from the front line or looking for the America we knew from TV and the news. Freedom, democracy, liberty, justice, equality. Peace. You can't be endangered if you come to the superpower country. I'm not romantic about anything anymore. Should Americans fear Islam? It is Islamic. Killers who are the central problem on the planet. There's a fair amount of research showing that we, especially white people, have a tendency to perceive members of other racial and ethnic groups as less human. At the implicit level, he's getting all of this other information that says they're a threat, they're terrorists, they're un-American, they're different. That implicit bias may have been affecting how he was interpreting his interactions all along. And maybe in that very final few moments. Charles Blunt, my brother. Well, the House of Representatives was driving out darkness with light. My brother's name translates from everything, which is meaning light. So that's why we call it the light house. And for me, everything that kind of happens out of this house, everything that's positive, any connection that's made anybody who's fed every prayer that's made goes back to him. Whoa, whoa, whoa. For the week before the murders, my mom was telling us I sense this, like, increase in hostility toward Muslims. I was like, what's the worst that can happen. If a muslim in America in his home at 5 p.m. is not safe? There is no place on earth to be safe. America was last home. We were able to meet with officials from the Obama justice and FBI examining the tapes, the computers, the cell phones. They were coming to us with the same answer, though. It's it looks like a crime. We cannot really prove it. Say it's crime because he did not declare why he killed them. And we as feds cannot take a case to court that we would lose. At the federal level. The mere fact that a person who is killed or murdered might be of a different race, that is simply not enough. If we define every crime where bias makes it easier to commit the crime as a hate crime, then we're going to define hate crimes very, very broadly. The dangers, if you do that, is that some people will be punished differently, not because they actually acted on account of bias, but simply because they've said bias things in the past. The question is, what do you want the law to do? I mean, from right here in the Triangle is on Capitol Hill today testifying about white nationalism. Dr. Abu-Salha. What happened to our children was a home invasion, an execution. Three beautiful young Americans were brutally murdered. And there's no question in our minds that this tragedy was born of bigotry and hatred. And I ask you, I truly plead to not to let another American family go through this, because our government would not act to protect all Americans. I've been worried about what arrangement would look like for years now, trying to figure out what exactly it will be like if you'll say anything. This case is very important to a lot a lot of people. The threat was universal. Like it could be me. It's going to reflect the reality of their environment, how safe their environment is. All rise is hard to say what justice is. Sometimes justice is in the eye of the beholder. Justice for me would be my child walking back to the door, and they will never have that. Today is about the narrative that not the murderer, not the aggressor, not the criminal, but the narrative that the victims and the truth. Stand by in 15 CRC five one, two one to first degree murder. A deer shot. Erica. How does the state's plead? Guilty all these years later? I'm more frustrated with our failure to reach the legal standard of a hate crime because it seems pretty clear that it was as hateful of a crime as you could ever imagine. I think we failed to understand that a significant portion of our community deal with some form of Islamophobia every day. It wasn't a lens through which we were thinking about that statement that day, and I think that was a pretty significant blind spot. If we had it to do, we can, we would do it differently. It will be three consecutive sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Mr. Sheriff, he's in your custody, sir. This case is like so many where we have a feeling that there's something more there, that there's bias there. That's a reflection of a broader, big societal problem that we have. To deal with. Iran. Yeah. We can address that. The truth is spoken. We need to understand where this kind of hatred can take us. The numbers of victims in these particular cases is like throwing the proverbial pedal in the pond and the rings go out and out and out forever. From here on, there'll be much discussion about how the memory of these beautiful people might be served and legislation might be one of them. We'll see what people are really made of. What we. A week before the murders, we all wanted to see how tall we were. So we all stood up against the wall, up against the doorframe, and just marked our hearts. You have my brother as I have my height. You have my dad. My mom, your sister. My sister. I stand up against the friend because I know my brothers too. Instead. Oh. Of course. I'm a different person. I can relate to human suffering more. I can understand their pain. I'm living now day by day, doing what needs to be done. But I'm working on the second I go join the exercise restaurant. If I can. They lived short, but they did big. Roseanne with I graduated the School of Design today. I wanted to experience driving by the building and imagining what's going on there. Roseanne was brutally murdered before the start of her second year, and she lived. She would be graduating today with a bachelor of Architecture degree. She had an intoxicating spark and a playful lightness that will continue to push us to move beyond the world we know to play in the world. We imagine one day we will reunite with them. Sometimes we see our dreams. And I feel that when I go to visit the grave, I feel the distance between me and them as just six feet. Six feet. I cannot penetrate. The world, which will not. Work out with the snow and. We want our nation, our government, to learn something from its at least that head doesn't work and cannot be hidden. It will manifest and the price is very dear and expensive yet. But we cannot star in it in us or out of the sun. All the money. 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