BREAKING: Craig Hicks pleads guilty to murder of three Muslim students

Murder defendant Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, left, listens while his co-defense counsel Terry Alford makes notes during a Monday, April 6, 2015 death penalty hearing for Hicks in Durham, N.C. Presiding Judge Orlando Hudson found the shooting deaths of three Muslim college students at Finley Forest residential complex in Chapel Hill in February 2015 made the Hicks case eligible for the death penalty. (Harry Lynch/Raleigh News & Observer/TNS)

Craig Stephen Hicks, the man charged with murdering three Muslim university students in 2015, has pleaded guilty to all three murders.

Hicks faced three counts of first-degree murder, for which he was sentenced three consecutive sentences of life in prison without parole, as well as a charge of shooting into an occupied dwelling, for which he was sentenced to 64-89 months.

The students, Deah Barakat, 23, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, were shot and killed in their Chapel Hill condo on Feb. 10, 2015. Barakat was a second-year student in the UNC Adams School of Dentistry. Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, his wife, was planning to begin her dental studies at UNC in the fall. Her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, was a student at N.C. State University.