Anisa Khalifa: Before we begin, a heads up that this episode contains descriptions of violence. Please listen with care.
Right now, we’re seeing a record spike in hate crimes in the United States.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS BROADCASTS)
Unidentified Anchor: Prosecutors in Colorado have started laying out their case for hate crimes charges…
Unidentified Anchor: In New York City an alleged antisemitic hate crime caught on camera…
Unidentified Anchor: Police say the stabbing of a Palestinian American man in Austin, Texas this week meets the definition of a hate crime…
Anisa Khalifa: For centuries, Americans have been hurting and killing each other based on who they are and where they come from.
Unidentified Speaker: And we have to talk about those type of things. We don't get past those things if we pretend that they don't happen.
Anisa Khalifa: That legacy of racist violence is a particularly painful wound in the South. As a nation, we've had protest movements and created laws to curb that violence. But the law doesn't deliver perfect justice.
Unidentified Speaker: Unless your family members and your loved ones are recording and lived exemplary lives, there is a high chance your story is not going to be told and it doesn't matter.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. You’re listening to The Broadside — where we tell stories from our home in North Carolina, at the crossroads of the South. This week: we follow the aftermath of a shocking act of violence — and ask, what happens when you're a victim of a hate crime, but that narrative is taken from you? And what place do state and federal hate crime laws have in the pursuit of justice?
Deah Barakat grew up in Raleigh, where his Syrian American family were a pillar of the local Muslim community. In Ramadan, the family would host huge iftars, meals where over a hundred people would break the day's fast together. Whatever version of the American Dream you've got in your head, the Barakats checked all the boxes. Deah grew up with his sweetheart, Yusor Abu-Salha, a child of Palestinian Jordanian immigrants. In the spring of 2014, Yusor did an interview for StoryCorps in Durham. She and her family had just become US citizens.
Yusor Abu-Salha: Growing up in America has been such a blessing and although in some ways I do stand out, such as the hijab, the head covering, um, there’s still so many ways that I feel so embedded in the fabric that is, you know, our culture. And here, we’re all one.
Anisa Khalifa: Deah and Yusor married in December. And after a fairytale wedding and honeymoon, they returned to live in their apartment in Chapel Hill. Deah was in his second year at UNC-Chapel Hill's dental school. Yusor was planning to start there in the fall. He was a huge Steph Curry fan; she was a big movie buff.
Farris Barakat: Growing up, he was the best friend, he was present.
Anisa Khalifa: Farris Barakat is Deah's brother. Deah was the baby of the family, but the brothers were just 18 months apart.
Farris Barakat: As we grew older, uh, well, we stayed, we stayed close, went to the same university and whatnot.
Anisa Khalifa: Farris says one of his brother’s defining features was his deep commitment to helping people. Along with his wife, he provided dental care to refugees and was the kind of person who tried to uplift his community.
Farris Barakat: Who leverages what has been given to him for the service of others, and one of the biggest things that stands out is, honestly, a new husband. Somebody who was in love with Yusor, his wife. They were really just defined by their love for each other as well.
Anisa Khalifa: Farris and his new sister-in-law worked together at a courier company. Just six weeks after the wedding, at 7pm on February 10th, 2015, Yusor had left for the day and Farris was finishing up. That's when his mom called.
Farris Barakat: And she starts asking me questions like, Hey, have you heard from your brother? Um, which basically just started, uh, the series of events of me finding out through Twitter that there was a shooting at Summerwalk Circle.
Anisa Khalifa: Summerwalk Circle — Deah and Yusor's street. Farris dropped everything and rushed out of the office.
Farris Barakat: On the way out, a colleague was asking me, uh, where I'm going and I told him, I think my brother just got murdered.
Anisa Khalifa: That night, Yusor's 19-year-old sister Razan had joined the couple for dinner. As they sat down to eat, there was a knock on the door. Deah answered. It was a neighbor, Craig Hicks. He had angrily approached the young family several times since their marriage. Sometimes he would threaten them verbally. Other times he would brandish a gun. Hicks once confronted Yusor’s mother at the apartment, saying, "I don't like the look of you people. Get out of here."
On this day, he was armed again. There was a brief exchange about Deah needing to move his car, and then… Craig Hicks shot Deah. Hicks stepped over Deah's body and shot Yusor, and then Razan, as they screamed and pleaded for their lives. All three were shot in the head, execution style, in the space of 36 seconds. Then, Hicks calmly drove to Chatham County Sheriff's Office and turned himself in. Footage from his initial interview shows him laughing and joking with the officer who took his statement.
In their shock and grief, some family members immediately turned to prayer. But Farris also knew that they needed an official channel for information. A media firestorm was already kicking up internationally. Farris created a Facebook group to put out burial announcements and updates on the case. And he called that group Our Three Winners.
Farris Barakat: Really just kind of recognizing that from then on, like, even as like, an immediate response to their murders, it's like, wow, they lived a good life. Those were, were good people.
Anisa Khalifa: I remember those first days after the murders vividly, because this is my community, too. And once that Facebook page was up, we all began to refer to Deah, Yusor and Razan as Our Three Winners. In a way, it was a refusal to let the story of their lives be swallowed by their tragic end. But telling that story would not be as straightforward as it seemed to the victims' loved ones. It turned into a battle that would go on for years. To the Barakats and Abu-Salhas — and to Muslims around the world — it looked like these 3 young people were murdered for who they were. But local law enforcement framed it as something else entirely.
The next morning, Chapel Hill Police released a statement that, quote, "the crime was motivated by an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking". That story about why Craig Hicks killed three people was taken from the murderer himself — and was quickly picked up by national and international media without much scrutiny. The Barakats and Abu-Salhas had just been through the worst day of their lives. These two families needed time to grieve. But this narrative that Our Three Winners were killed over a parking space… it forced them to become activists.
(SOUNDBITES OF FAMILY MEMBER INTERVIEWS)
Unidentified Speaker: We are still in a state of shock and will never be able to make sense of this horrendous tragedy. We appreciate your concern…
Unidentified Speaker: I feel it, I have no doubt that he would not have acted that way if they were not clearly Muslims.
Unidentified Speaker: We ask that the authorities investigate these senseless and heinous murders as a hate crime.
Anisa Khalifa: That advocacy was on two fronts: First, to educate Americans about anti-Muslim racism. And second, to get Craig Hicks charged with a federal hate crime, because North Carolina's laws fell short. But for the Department of Justice, the calculus was simple: A federal hate crime charge wouldn't increase Craig Hicks' punishment, so it wasn't worth pursuing. Farris says that for the families, that pragmatic approach missed the point.
Farris Barakat: It conflicts with the movement that we need at the federal level to better track hate crimes. If we don't even feel the need to classify them as hate crimes, we're not going to have the information, the data, the backing to then say this is even a problem.
Anisa Khalifa: By 2019, four years had passed since the murders, and the families were exhausted. They had been denied federal hate crime charges. And they felt increasingly hopeless in a climate where sitting US President, Donald Trump, had run on an explicitly Islamophobic platform.
Unidentified Anchor: Donald Trump sure knows how to grab a headline. He did it yesterday. The Republican presidential candidate called for the United States to block all Muslims…
Donald Trump: …entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.
Anisa Khalifa: At the time, the nation was reeling from a succession of mass killings of religious minorities. So that April, Dr Mohammad Abu-Salha testified in Congress about the murders — and the broader issue of hate facing America.
Chairman: Thank you. Dr. Abu-Salha?
Mohammad Abu-Salha: Thank you Mr. Chairman, esteemed members of Congress and ladies and gentlemen…
Anisa Khalifa: Yusor and Razan's father called for stronger and more expansive hate crime laws both at the state and federal levels. But Farris told me that the hearing was full of theatrical one-upmanship between Republicans and Democrats, instead of a serious reckoning with the issue.
Farris Barakat: In my mind, as naive as it was, it was supposed to be a real conversation. Somehow, the stories of Deah, Yusor and Razan might make a difference in the minds of people who can't seem to agree on much, but that we can agree that these lives should have been protected and not wasted, but I don't, honestly wouldn't say much came out of it.
Mohammad Abu-Salha: At times the pain is just as sharp now as it was when they died, and I ask you — I truly plead to you — not to let another American family family go through this…
Anisa Khalifa: A couple of months later, back in North Carolina, their killer was finally sentenced. But he wouldn't be charged with a state hate crime either.
Satana Deberry: So North Carolina doesn't have a felony hate crime statute.
Anisa Khalifa: Satana Deberry is the Durham County District Attorney. The case of the Chapel Hill murders was one of the first that came across her desk after she was sworn in as DA in 2019.
Satana Deberry: Hate crime can be an aggravating factor in a felony murder, but this was already a first degree murder, so there was no need for enhancement in this case.
Anisa Khalifa: Craig Hicks was already facing the maximum punishment for three counts of 1st degree murder. He pleaded guilty and agreed to serve consecutive life sentences, so there was no trial to push back against the narrative that Deah, Yusor and Razan were killed over a parking spot.
Satana Deberry: I think for anybody who's a person of color, anybody who's a racial, ethnic minority, a religious minority, that, I don't know that ever sat well with people. And for me, when I started looking through the evidence in this case, to me it was clear that it could not have been just about parking.
Anisa Khalifa: And that's why, when it came time for the sentencing, Satana's team was determined to correct that narrative.
Satana Deberry: And that is also why it was important, we felt, for there to be, um, an open sentencing hearing. And for that to be on the record, right, so that is now on the record forever.
(SOUNDBITE OF SENTENCING HEARING)
Satana Deberry: For the first-degree murder of Deah Shaddy Barakat, the state requests the sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
Anisa Khalifa: The hearing took place in June of 2019, a little over four years after Our Three Winners were killed. I didn't attend, but I watched it on Facebook Live with my family. I don't think I'll ever be able to forget it. The victims’ families were present and gave a statement. And then, for a short period, cameras and microphones were turned off. Only the people in that courtroom heard something horrifying: the last moments of Deah, Yusor and Razan's lives. Deah had been recording video on his cell phone. He wanted evidence to prove to the police that their neighbor was a threat.
Satana Deberry: It was an emotional, it was a very emotional hearing. I don't know that I recognized how important it would be to people to be in that room and to hear it, and how dramatic it would be for them to hear it and how emotional. But it was necessary.
Anisa Khalifa: That evening, Chapel Hill police chief Chris Blue released a statement apologizing for initially mischaracterizing the triple murder. He said, quote, "What we all know now and what I wish we had said four years ago is that the murders of Deah, Yusor, and Razan were about more than simply a parking dispute. To the Abu-Salha and Barakat families, we extend our sincere regret that any part of our message all those years ago added to the pain you experienced through the loss of Our Three Winners."
It's been 9 years since Farris lost his brother, his sister-in-law and her sister. He says that when you or a loved one are the victim of a hate crime, the prospects for justice are bleak.
Farris Barakat: I think most likely, Nothing's going to happen. Most likely, that story's not going to be told. Most likely, the narrative is going to be, it's a parking dispute. Most likely, you're going to suffer alone. Because that's just the story of millions of individuals in our history.
Anisa Khalifa: But his family’s story is finally being told — in a documentary called 36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime.
(SOUNDBITE FROM TRAILER OF 36 SECONDS)
Unidentified Speaker: 36 seconds. That's how long it took to shatter our lives forever.
Anisa Khalifa: The film premiered at the DOC NYC festival last fall and depicts their long struggle to set the story straight — in the media, and in the legal system. Farris told me he's grateful, but it's tough to think about so many other victims who don't get that opportunity. And all of this — hate crime charges, sentencing, telling the true story of why someone was hurt or killed — comes after the fact. It doesn't prevent the violence in the first place. And no punishment can ever make up for the harm done.
Farris Barakat: How we respond to those who hurt us… I am entitled to a strong rebuke, that I do so, but with wisdom, with hope, and with knowing that darkness only brings out darkness and that in response to darkness, even a little bit of light goes a long way.
Anisa Khalifa: When we come back, we look at how the Civil Rights movement in the South helped establish our first hate crime laws. And ask…is legislation a real solution for identity-based violence?
I came of age right around 9/11. I know what it's like to be demonized for your faith, and live in fear of exactly the kind of violence that took Our Three Winners' lives. Anti-Muslim hate crimes peaked in the early aughts, and rose again during Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. I viscerally remember how unsafe I felt walking around in my own neighborhood during those times, alert for danger because I'm easy to identify as a Muslim.
And now, like so many other times in the history of our nation, violence overseas echoes at home. In the months since October 7th, when Hamas attacked and Israel responded with an all-out war on Gaza, there has been a wave of violent hate incidents against both Palestinian and Jewish Americans. The FBI says that hate crimes against all groups are at an all-time record high.
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Unidentified Speaker: As the FBI has noted, we are seeing an increase in reported threats against faith communities, particularly Jewish, Muslim, and Arab communities and institutions.
Anisa Khalifa: Let's talk about the data for a minute. The FBI started tracking hate crime data in 1990, after Congress passed the Hate Crimes Statistics Act. The most recent data, from 2022, reports 11,613 hate crimes — the highest number ever recorded in a single year. And yet, experts say that FBI statistics vastly underrepresent the true number of incidents. The FBI relies on data sent to it by local law enforcement agencies, and the parameters for what each state considers a hate crime vary widely. And a lot of folks experience hate incidents that they never report to the police.
According to a 2021 US Bureau of Justice Statistics study, Americans reported experiencing a quarter million hate incidents every year from 2005 to 2019. That's more than twenty times the FBI's number. The stats show a clear gap between how the criminal justice system approaches hate crimes, and how people actually experience hate incidents. And that's been the case especially here in the South.
Satana Deberry: The South has a history of the lynching of Black people. Those people were hanged because of white supremacy and the hate against them.
Anisa Khalifa: Durham County DA Satana Deberry grew up Black in the South, to parents who grew up in the Jim Crow South. She knows our painful past with hate crimes. Even today, Black Americans are targeted by violence more than any other group. And despite the weight of that history, despite all the movements for civil rights over the years…right now, Satana says, we still don't have an adequate way to investigate, charge, or prosecute hate crimes in North Carolina.
Satana Deberry: As a prosecutor I have 100 percent discretion in determining how cases are charged. And, I only have the tools, though, that the statutes give me.
Anisa Khalifa: Why does it matter — if someone is charged with first degree murder and they're getting the maximum sentence, why does it matter whether that's just charged as a murder or if it's charged as a hate crime?
Satana Deberry: So my job is not just to prosecute people. I'm a minister of justice. My job is to seek the truth and to seek accountability when we hurt each other. And to just say that Deah and Razan and Yusor were murdered is not enough. No one deserves to be hurt. And there is literally nothing about the lives of those three people that would have put them in that kind of harm's way, other than the fact that they were openly religious, right? That their culture and custom put them in the crosshairs of somebody who did not like that. And did not like having them there. And we have to talk about those type of things. We don't get past those things if we pretend that they don't happen.
Anisa Khalifa: Dr. Arwin Smallwood is a historian and dean at NC Central University. I met him at the iconic Woolworths in downtown Greensboro where four A&T students launched a movement of sit-ins in 1960.
Do the original students who participated in this lunch counter sit-in, do they ever come back and come and speak?
Arwin Smallwood: Oh yeah. Yes, they come back every February 1st.
Anisa Khalifa: That's really special. Maybe next year I'll come in February and visit y'all.
Arwin Smallwood: Oh yeah, yeah.
Anisa Khalifa: Today, that old department store is a Civil Rights museum.
So, can you describe what we're looking at?
Arwin Smallwood: So, we're, we're looking at a display case of pages of what's called the Green Book.
Anisa Khalifa: The Green Book was one way that Black folks tried to protect themselves from the ever-present threat of violence while traveling in the South. It contained lists of hotels, restaurants, and tourist attractions.
Arwin Smallwood: You knew that those places were going to be safe and that you would, you know, be cared for and that you wouldn't have to worry about any of the things that you would associate with being in the wrong place in the South during that particular time.
Anisa Khalifa: But measures like this were only a stopgap. Identity-based violence is particularly scary because it's unpredictable. It can happen anywhere, at any time. And it even invades what should be the safest spaces — our homes. Our places of worship. Arwin told me the first American hate crime laws were part of the first Civil Rights Act in 1964.
Arwin Smallwood: And then in '68, with the assassination of King on April 4th, again, pushing Congress to really address intolerance, you know what — what happens when we allow people to be intolerant. And so that kind of motivated the passage of both of those legislations.
Lyndon B. Johnson: I do not exaggerate when I say that the proudest moments of my presidency have been times such as this.
Anisa Khalifa: Lyndon B. Johnson signed the second Civil Rights Act into law only days after Martin Luther King Jr's death, in the wake of massive uprisings across the country. That legislation set a precedent that would need to be reinforced again every few years, as people pushed for stronger hate crime laws that protected more kinds of people. And each additional law was preceded by a high-profile act of violence, or a sharp rise in hate toward a specific community. Arwin says that legislation does have an impact. Like the 14th amendment abolishing slavery, it can make a huge difference in people's lives — but it's not enough on its own.
Arwin Smallwood: For me, it's about educating people as much as it is about legislating our law, right? Because if a person has that, you know, frustration, that anger, that whatever, and they lash out in that way, they're not thinking about the law, right? And so how do we stop that impulse and that emotion at that moment? We do that through education. We do that through humanizing people rather than dehumanizing people.
Anisa Khalifa: Our country's history with identity-based violence has always had its ups and downs.
Arwin Smallwood: America ebbs and flows.
Anisa Khalifa: When people feel secure — in their jobs, their education, their housing—we tend to have calm. But when people feel threatened, fear rises. And if you're afraid of something…
Arwin Smallwood: You know, then you tend to develop a dislike or hatred for it. And when you hate or dislike something, then you tend to want to, you know, destroy it, to kill it.
Anisa Khalifa: Arwin says that right now, the country is in a period of transformation — and it's hard to tell if this will be one of the times America lives up to its ideals, or falls short.
Arwin Smallwood: But, If we look at our constitution, if we go all the way back and we talk about slavery and we talk about Jim Crow and segregation and we talk about, you know, where we were as a nation and where we are today as a nation, there has been change. There has been, you know, a progression. Where we will go in the future, it really is up to you and I.
Anisa Khalifa: 60 years after LBJ signed the first Civil Rights Act, we have come a long way. And most states do have hate crime laws. But those laws are often narrow in scope, or have no real teeth. Arkansas only protects religion. Ohio only protects race. So victims may have no choice but to try for federal charges. Across the country, people are working to change that at the state level. Here in North Carolina, partly inspired by the Chapel Hill murders, three Democratic State Senators sponsored a bill called the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. It would raise North Carolina's misdemeanor hate crime to a felony. It would also expand to cover sexual orientation, gender identity and disability, which are not currently protected categories. Since the bill was introduced in 2017, it’s been filed multiple times without passing, and is still in limbo.
Grassroots activists in North Carolina haven't given up. They continue to organize for broader and stronger hate crime laws. But the Barakats and Abu-Salhas have mostly stepped back from speaking publicly about the tragedy… and prefer to focus on the other legacy that Our Three Winners left behind. Since 2015, many people have carried on the community work that was so important to Deah, Yusor and Razan. Every fall, UNC Chapel Hill's school of dentistry holds a day of service called Deah Day, in their honor.
Unidentified Speaker: Deah Day is a day for the entire dental community at the school to go out and volunteer and give back to the community just like Deah Yusor and Razan were.
Anisa Khalifa: Deah means "light" in Arabic. After his death, Deah's family founded the Light House Project, a nonprofit that provides community and resources to the young Muslims following in his footsteps. For those who loved them, it's a powerful way to remember not just how they died, but how they lived: with faith, joy and service.
If you or someone you know has been impacted by a hate incident, there are many ways to report and document it. You can reach out to local advocacy organizations that cater to your community. You can also report a hate crime online in 24 languages with the Department of Justice. We've put a link in the episode description.
This episode of The Broadside was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa and edited by Jerad Walker and Wilson Sayre. Special thanks to Charlie Shelton-Ormond and Eli Chen. Thanks also to Tarek Albaba, director of the documentary feature 36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime. You can watch the trailer and arrange for a screening at the link in the show notes. And thank you to the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina for allowing us to record in their space. The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. I’m Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.