UNC Students Honor Shooting Victims with Day of Service

Students in the UNC School of Dentistry gathered last Thursday for a day of service in memory of a fellow student murdered earlier this year.

Thursday marked 219 days since three Muslim college students were shot and killed in the Finley Forest Condominiums in Chapel Hill. One of those killed was Deah Barakat, a student in the School of Dentistry at Carolina.

The Durham District Attorney’s office is pursuing the death penalty against 46-year-old Craig Stephen Hicks in the case. Police maintain the shooting was the result of a long-running parking dispute. Others, including the victims’ families, believe the murders should be classified as a hate crime.

Christopher Walker is a fourth-year student in the School of Dentistry and class president. He is one of several organizers of the day of service that was held to honor Deah, his wife Yusor and her sister Razan.

“We decided a good way to honor the legacy of Deah, and also remember his wife and sister-in-law, would be to get out and do community service throughout the Triangle,” he says, “because Deah and Yusor were both so active in activities from donating tooth brushes to schools and children, to working with homeless populations in the Triangle.”

Walker says more than 350 students from the school’s dental, dental assistant and dental hygiene programs took to over 20 locations across the Triangle to get involved.

“We did kind of a wide-ranging set of projects,” he says, “dealing with everything from providing food, oral hygiene instruction, [and] environmental work. There were some [volunteers] working with animals.

“We did a lot of stuff and hit a lot of the corners of the Triangle with different service projects.”

Walker says it was important in his mind for an event to be organized to remember the legacy of the three victims who seemed to have such a passion for helping others.

“I just knew Deah as someone that was very giving of his time,” he says. “My favorite story about Deah is he understood that dental students were spending a lot of money on coffee at this coffee shop we have nearby that services the medical campus.

“And he just bought a coffee maker and stocked it and put it in the student lounge and sent out an e-mail to everybody and said, ‘Hey, have coffee, bring what you want.’”

Walker says he took some time off from school before coming back to the School of Dentistry and seeing someone as young as Deah with as much vigor for helping others inspired him.

“It was a kid like that that just inspired me to want to be better,” he says. “I’m a little bit older, I went back to school a little bit later, and to watch a young person have so much passion for giving back to his community, both locally and internationally, I felt like I wanted to be a part of doing something that really cements his legacy as being a really great student and a great servant of his neighborhood and his school.”

Walker adds he was grateful for the beautiful day in our community on Thursday so that all of the projects went off without a hitch.

“I think someone was looking out for us,” he says, “it was beautiful out there.”

Walker says he is very grateful to everyone involved, including the university for allowing all of the students across the school to take part in the day of service. He adds he is hopeful this will evolve into an annual event to carry on the legacy of those three lives that were ended too early.