The Our Three Winners scholarship commemorates the lives of the three students shot and killed Feb. 10 at Chapel Hill’s Finley Forest neighborhood, a crime that some believe was a hate crime against the Muslim students. Barakat, Razan Abu-Salha and Yusor Abu-Salha each attended N.C. State as undergraduates.
“Like my father said, that was probably the first happy moment we’ve had since the incident as a family,” said Yousef Abu-Salha, brother of Razan Abu-Salha and Yusor Abu-Salha.
The scholarship will be supported by an endowment fund to which N.C. State will contribute $60,000, said Laurie Reinhardt-Plotnik, the university’s associate vice chancellor for development. Outside contributions are also being accepted.
“In the conversations that we had with the family about how to honor these students most meaningfully, they felt that the three colleges that are represented enabled their children to blossom,” Reinhardt-Plotnik said.
Students in the Poole College of Management, the College of Sciences and the College of Design who demonstrate the qualities possessed by the three students will be given the award, possibly as soon as fall 2015, said Kushal Dasgupta, the university’s associate vice chancellor for advancement services.
Yousef Abu-Salha said the scholarship is a perfect testament to the three students and their values.
“What was very special to us is that this aligns with our faith,” he said.
“We have a concept in Islam called continuous charity. Any charity that goes on for a while — building a library or a place of worship or something like that, or even planting a tree, something that will last longer than our lifetimes — we believe that has the capacity to generate good deeds for you, even after death.”
