Students and community members filled the Great Hall of the Carolina Union, on Feb. 11, gathering for an evening of remembrance and community learning. The event, a screening of the documentary “36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime,” marked 10 years since the murder of UNC dentistry student Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Abu-Salha and her sister Razan Abu-Salha, a student at N.C. State.
The three were eating dinner in Barakat and Abu-Salha’s home in Chapel Hill on Feb. 10, 2015 when their neighbor, Craig Hicks, entered their home and killed them within 36 seconds. Though Hicks had expressed strong anti-religion rhetoric on social media and had harassed Yusor Abu-Salha, who wore a hijab, the murders were never prosecuted as a hate crime.
The UNC Muslim Students Association, in conjunction with The Light House Project and Our Three Winners Foundation, organized the event. The documentary screening was followed by a panel discussion featuring Dr. Suzanne Barakat and Dr. Yousef Abu-Salha, who are siblings of the victims, as well as film director Tarek Albaba.
Albaba said creating the documentary felt like being called up to duty because he had felt the immediate aftermath of the murders, understood the feelings of anger and frustration among the Muslim community and had seen first-hand hate and ignorance growing up in the South as a Muslim-American.
“One of my greatest takeaways is that this is actually a case study into what happens when we come together as a community, and not just our community but our allies, and we say ‘enough is enough,'” Albaba said during the panel discussion.
The documentary tells the story of the lives of Deah Barakat and the Abu-Salha sisters, who became known as “our three winners” after their deaths. It explores their families’ fight to correct the narrative surrounding the crime and their fight for reform amidst increasing anti-Muslim rhetoric.
“The fight, as you see here in the film, was correcting a narrative,” Suzanne Barakat said in the panel. “It was a narrative of taking the voice of a white supremacist man who turned himself in saying he killed them over a parking dispute.”
Mina Bayraktar, the vice president of MSA, said the community continues to talk about Deah Barakat and the Abu-Salha sisters, and commemorates them each year on the anniversary of their death.
