Neighbors Say Suspect in Chapel Hill Shootings Was Threatening

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Neighbors knew Craig Stephen Hicks. He was the angry man on Summerwalk Circle, they said — irritated about noise, irascible about parking, hostile to religion. And armed.

Mr. Hicks was such a disruptive presence in the Finley Forest condominium complex that last year, residents held a meeting to talk about him.

None of them, of course, could have foreseen that he might be charged with murdering three people in a neighboring apartment on Tuesday: two sisters, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Yusor’s husband, Deah Shaddy Barakat — all of them Muslim. But some neighbors felt threatened by his behavior.

“I have seen and heard him be very unfriendly to a lot of people in this community,” said Samantha Maness, a resident of the complex. She said that Mr. Hicks had displayed “equal opportunity anger” and that “he kind of made everyone feel uncomfortable and unsafe.”

Mr. Hicks is enrolled at Durham Technical Community College, working toward earning “multiple certifications in our paralegal technologies program,” according to a spokeswoman for the school, Carver Weaver. Ms. Weaver said in an email that Mr. Hicks was “a student in good standing and has been since fall 2012.”

A paralegal instructor at Durham Tech, Susan Sutton, confirmed in a telephone call her previous comments to a local news media organization that Mr. Hicks was a bright, conscientious, good student, and said there had been no sign that anything was wrong.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Richard Pérez-Peña contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on February 13, 2015, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Accused of Murder, Remembered as Threatening. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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