Marking the deaths of three Muslim students killed in February 2015, communities, organizations and students joined together on Saturday to remember their lives and continue to build their legacies three years later.
“Our Three Winners” — Deah Barakat, 23, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and Razan Abu-Salha, 19 — were shot execution-style in Deah and Yusor’s home located in a Chapel Hill apartment complex by Craig Hicks, 46. Hicks was the upstairs neighbor of Deah and Yusor, who were recently married in December 2014; Razan, the younger sister of Yusor and a student in NC State’s College of Design at the time, had been visiting.
Deah and Yusor were graduates of NC State in the Poole College of Management and the College of Sciences, respectively. Deah was a second-year student at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Dentistry where Yusor planned to attend in fall 2015. They both dedicated their lives to service through NC State’s Muslim Student Association, the Islamic Association of Raleigh and their community.
“It’s very hard to describe because you don’t get people like that very often,” said Fiaz Fareed, the director of outreach at the Islamic Association of Raleigh. “Because they were the cream of the crop, as they say.”
On the Thursday following the deaths of Deah, Yusor and Razan, NC State came together with the Islamic Association of Raleigh to hold the funeral on Method Fields.
“There was no parking all the way to Hillsborough,” Fareed said. “It was an amazing sight. There were about close to 6,000 that we counted, and then we gave up because we could just not continue. There were easily, I think, more than 50 percent were non-Muslims because they were so affected; they were so very well-known.”
Chancellor Randy Woodson said that NC State was there to help not only the mosque, but also the family, hold a funeral service for Deah, Yusor and Razan.
“On the day of the event, I went to the mosque and met with the family,” Woodson said. “We reached out to the family to see how we could help. The original service commemorating their lives was held on our campus at the soccer fields near Method Road across the street from the mosque, so that was big. We held vigils on both campuses.”
In response to the death of his brother, Farris Barakat, the executive director of The Light House Project, left his planned career path and devoted himself to renovating the 105-year-old house his brother had owned east of downtown Raleigh.
“When my brother was murdered, the idea was, this house had to be inherited by someone and he didn’t have kids, so I guess it went back to the parents,” Barakat said. “They decided that they wanted to do something with the house to kind of further his legacy.”
The house, which officially opened February 2017, was named after Deah, whose name means ‘light.’ Over the past year, it has served as a community center for local youth and support system for startup nonprofit programs, all while educating people on what it truly means to be a Muslim American.
“To figure out how to best accomplish that goal we came up with a model of fiscal sponsorship,” Barakat said. “Essentially like an incubator for nonprofit programs … kind of [create] a second environment for companies to come get guidance, and it’s a good environment for them to learn and support their need.”
Along with the legacy it continues to hold for Our Three Winners throughout the year, The Light House Project has celebrated the lives of Deah, Yusor and Razan throughout the month with a spoken word performance, an award honoring those who have served their community and a canned food drive that goes until Feb. 24.
“The fact that people continue to do things in their honor, I think speaks so much about who they were and also good intentions,” Barakat said. “We can all get involved in something … they were doing good enough work that everyone else felt like they wanted to step up and take on something.”
The canned food drive connects The Light House Project, the Islamic Association, NC State and other organizations to help Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina. NC State also created a scholarship fund to honor Deah, Yusor and Razan in each of their fields of study.
“We worked with each of the colleges to say ‘How can we honor each of their individual legacies in your college but their collected legacy as three winners?’” Woodson said. “Our goal was to create endowments in each of the three colleges that would fund a minimum of two scholarships and we’re well past that now. We’re funding at least two scholarships in each college.”
The NC State Muslim Student Association (MSA) will be collecting cans and nonperishable foods at one of their prayer spaces in D.H. Hill throughout the month for the food drive, but also did its part to remember the legacy of Deah, Yusor and Razan through a basketball tournament dedicated to Deah this past Saturday.
“We’re also doing the ‘Dunking for Deah’ basketball tournament,” said Moneeb Sayed, a fourth-year studying science, technology and society and the president of MSA. “We’re going to be donating a portion of the proceeds to the Our Three Winners Foundation … when we’re doing events, we want to remind the community about the lives that they lived and the good that they’d done.”
Sayed was also a student at the university when Deah, Yusor and Razan were killed. NC State held a vigil in the Brickyard the Thursday after the shooting occurred on Feb. 10. With more students who were present during the time of the Our Three Winners tragedy graduating, Sayed said that it’s become more important to remember their legacy.
“They were college students just like us,” Sayed said. “It could have been any one of us. That’s important to learn from what happened, to learn from the past and really be more vocal about what we’re doing, who we are, because really we’re all in the world together.”
Surrounded by the family members of slain students Deah Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, Chancellor Randy Woodson announces the University's establishment of the "Our Three Winners" scholarship endowment fund Friday morning, Feb. 20, 2015 at the Roy H. Park Alumni Center. The endowment will provide annual financial support to NC State students studying in the Poole College of Management, College of Sciences, and College of Design.
