In this undated photo, Deah Barakat and his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, celebrate receiving his white dentist coat on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Shortly before they were gunned down, a young Muslim couple was eating out with relatives when the conversation turned to anti-Islamic attitudes in the United States.

It was January 2015, months before the massacres in Chattanooga, Paris and San Bernardino, California. Deah Barakat and Yusor Abu-Salha had just gotten married and started living together in an apartment near the University of North Carolina.

When Barakat’s mother worried aloud that the family could be harmed because of their religion, “we were all laughing it off, like: ‘Nothing bad is going to happen. This is America,’” said Deah’s brother, Farris.

“’Watch it happen,’” Farris Barakat recalled his sister-in-law saying. “’You guys won’t be laughing.’“

About 10 days later, the couple was killed in their apartment along with Yusor’s younger sister, Razan. A white neighbor, who described himself as an atheist and expressed disdain for religion, has been charged with capital murder.

The families believe the three were targeted because of their faith; the sisters’ father says federal prosecutors recently told him they are still considering charging the defendant, Craig Hicks, with a hate crime.

The deaths of the three young Muslims lie at the intersection of themes that have gripped the American psyche in recent months: gun violence, attitudes toward Islam and the justice system’s handling of racially charged slayings.

Yet as the anniversary of the killings draw near, the victims’ families are channeling their grief elsewhere, into deeply personal philanthropic projects meant to honor them.

“Deah, Yusor and Razan were very good representatives of Muslim-Americans,” said Farris Barakat. “We’re not scary. We’re not ‘the other.’ And I think people should see that.”

The families see the charitable projects as a continuation of volunteer work the three victims were passionate about.

It’s work that’s needed all the more, the grieving relatives say, since terror attacks in the US and Europe have ratcheted up anti-Muslim rhetoric, including calls to turn away Syrian refugees.

“There’s this concept in Islam called a continuous charity,” Farris Barakat said. “The idea is that your good deeds don’t have to end when you die.”

In August, Farris Barakat and his father, Namee, traveled to Turkey to complete a project that 23-year-old Deah Barakat had launched before his death: a dental clinic for Syrian refugees. Fifteen dentists and 40 or so other volunteers treated about 800 refugees, most of them children.

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