There’s no sense to be made in the execution-style murders of three young adults in Chapel Hill, N.C., on Tuesday. The killings should shock and anger us universally.

A middle-aged white man shot his neighbors — a newlywed couple and the woman’s sister — ostensibly in a long-running dispute over parking at their condominium complex.

The victims were self-motivated, exemplary students who shared a world view — a circumstance that makes their deaths all the more tragic. Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her husband, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, were honors college graduates pursuing doctorates in dentistry at the University of North Carolina. Deah was to travel to Turkey this summer with a team of dentists to treat Syrian refugee children. Yusor’s sister, Razan Abu-Salha, 19, was a dean’s list student in architecture and environmental design at North Carolina State University.

But another circumstance — that all three were practicing Muslims — raises the possibility of religious persecution. Relatives of the victims cite the vicious nature of the murders — all three were shot in the head — and the suspect’s atheistic Facebook rants against all religion to suggest the shootings were a hate crime.

Hate is a possible and even likely motive. The sisters wore the traditional hijab head scarves. The sisters’ father, a North Carolina psychiatrist, says one of his daughters told him she had a “hateful neighbor” who harassed them about their Muslim attire. He says the suspect, Craig Steven Hicks, previously had confronted his daughter and her husband “with his gun in his belt.”

Within hours of the murders, Twitter and Facebook posts suggesting a hate crime had gone global. Police and federal prosecutors have not been so quick to make that determination.

U.S. Attorney Ripley Rand said the shooting appeared to have been “an isolated incident” and “not part of a targeted campaign against Muslims.” The Chapel Hill police chief has stuck to the parking dispute but added, “We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated, and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case.”

If they seem overly cautious, it might be in reaction to the last criminal scandal in North Carolina’s Research Triangle — in the neighboring city of Durham, where the head coach of Duke University’s lacrosse team was forced to resign in 2006 over rape allegations that later were exposed as false. The community is still smarting from the collective condemnations that ruined the reputations of three college athletes, their mentor and the district attorney, who was disbarred for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.” Thirteen months after the accusations first surfaced, the state attorney general threw out all the charges, declared the accused lacrosse players innocent and called them victims of “a tragic rush to accuse.”

If justice proceeds slowly in the Research Triangle, it does so for good reason — they don’t need another “rush to accusation” scandal. But we trust justice will prevail eventually and that investigators will exhaust every lead to determine the truth as to whether a hate crime did or did not occur.