Shooter: Waited until now to act
We know people with violent tendencies and anger and control issues could lose it over a parking spot, which police say may have been the motivator here. We know Craig Stephen Hicks, the 46-year-old jerk who, allegedly, did the shooting (he did the shooting) was described as angry and a person who carried a gun and an attitude and had no compassion for others.
But he didn’t act until now.
His ex-wife, who divorced him 17 years ago (he has a current wife, who says she is now divorcing him, not a bad move) told a story to media yesterday of how much he enjoyed the Michael Douglas movie Falling Down about a man with anger issues who gets fed up and shoots people. “That always freaked me out,” his ex-wife told The Associated Press. “He watched it incessantly. He thought it was hilarious. He had no compassion at all.”
We also know that he posted on a Facebook page various ramblings about his distorted version of atheism and how much he hated religious people. Of course, he wasn’t just angry at them, Hicks was angry period (neighbor Samantha Maness said he “was very angry, anytime I saw him.”
But he didn’t act until now .
We know those he killed execution style, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, said he threatened them before. They were afraid of him and said he did not like who they were, their religion, their dress.
They knew what it was about.
The father of those two dead sisters, Mohammad Abu-Salha, a psychiatrist, said the killings “were not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime” and that Hicks “picked on” the three and “talked with them with his gun in his belt.” One daughter spoke to him of Hicks. “Honest to God, she said, ‘He hates us for what we are and how we look,'” she told him.
Identifying hate crimes
Identifying a hate crime goes beyond the penalty-enhancement effect on sentencing. Without being aware of trends in crime how can we prevent them? The sentences this week of three white men who beat homeless black men in Mississippi, killing one, were lengthened becauase it was a hate crime (the leader got 70 years) but that designation was positive in other ways. It told us we have to be vigilant about racism, continue our education efforts and continue to seek new solutions
“We understand the concerns about the possibility this was hate-motivated and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case,” Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue said. We have to take him at his word and though the bar is high, we have to believe it will not be too high.
But if the justice system in this case fails us, fails those three innocent Americans, we must ourselves acknowledge what the motivator in this case was: hate.
And find ways to act.
