In Chapel Hill, Suspect’s Rage Went Beyond a Parking Dispute
In The New York Times, Jonathan M. Katz retraces the final hours of three murdered Muslim young adults in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the months leading up to their final confrontation with their neighbor Craig Stephen Hicks, who shot them on February 10. Katz writes, “A motive for the shooting may never be known. But interviews with more than a dozen of the victims’ friends and family members, lawyers, police officers and others make two central points: Before the shootings, the students took concerted steps to appease a menacing neighbor, and none were parked that day in a way that would have set off an incident involving their cars.” He continues, “If those accounts do not prove what kind of malice was in Mr. Hicks’s heart, the details that emerge indicate that whatever happened almost certainly was not a simple dispute over parking.”