PROFILE OF THE SUSPECT
Anti-religion but pro-gun
If his Facebook page is any indication, Craig Hicks doesn’t hate Muslims. An avowed atheist, his online posts instead depict a man who despises religion but nevertheless seems to support an individual’s right to his own beliefs.
“I hate Islam just as much as Christianity, but they have the right to worship in this country just as much as any others do,” the man now accused of killing three Muslim college students stated in one 2012 post over the proposed construction of a mosque near the World Trade Center site in New York.
Days after the shooting deaths of Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23; his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21; and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, a nuanced and sometimes contradictory portrait is emerging of the man charged in their slayings.
Police in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said they have yet to uncover any evidence that Hicks, 46, allegedly acted out of religious animus, but they are investigating the possibility. As a potential motive, they cited a dispute over parking spaces at the condo community where Hicks and two of the victims lived.
Hicks’s court-appointed lawyer, Stephen Freedman, said he could not comment on the case. Hicks was being held without bond.
In often publicly posted Facebook rants, Hicks was brazen about his disdain for all faiths. In one post regarding specific texts from the Qur’an, the Jewish Talmud and the Bible about battling non-believers, he wrote: “I wish they would exterminate each other!”
But he was just as passionate about personal freedom and liberty — championing an individual’s right to worship or not worship, legal abortion and gay marriage and, perhaps most fervently, the right under the U.S. Constitution to own and bear arms.
“I guess after the horrible tragedy early this week in Arizona, all Glock pistols will officially be labelled ‘assault weapons,’ ” he wrote after the January 2011 assassination attempt on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. “While I never cared for Glocks personally, it stinks that anyone would blame a firearm rather than the operator of such firearm for such a terrible act. I think I’ll start blaming McDonalds for my weight problem, Christianity for the Ku Klux Klan, and Islam for terrorism.”
Search warrants filed in court Friday listed a dozen firearms taken from Hicks’s condo unit, including four handguns, two shotguns and six rifles and a large cache of ammunition. That’s in addition to the pistol the suspect had with him when he turned himself in.
Hicks’s 20-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Sarah Hurley, said she shut him out of her life permanently years ago “for not only disrespecting the religious beliefs of others but bashing them on social media.” She verified that the Facebook page was Hicks’s.
Hicks and Cynthia Hurley, who lives outside of Raleigh, were divorced about 17 years ago.
She described a man who showed her no compassion but didn’t recall his having any particular animosity toward Islam or other religions.
In a news conference after her husband’s arrest, Karen Hicks seemed as baffled as anyone about how a man who loves the Pittsburgh Steelers, the U.S. Constitution and dogs — especially his own black and brown mutt, Rocky — could have done something so vicious. She was adamant that the shootings stemmed from a long-simmering dispute over parking at their condo complex, not the victims’ faith.