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.”
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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