Mohmoud Hassanen, the father of the seventeen-year-old Northern Virginia
high-school student who was murdered near her mosque early on Sunday
morning, appeared before the cameras for the first time at a press
conference on Tuesday night, looking haggard and stupefied. The police
had already arrested a suspect—Darwin Martinez Torres, a
twenty-two-year-old Salvadoran man—and charged him with killing
Hassanen’s daughter, Nabra. The reporters were there to ask if Hassanen
thought that his daughter’s murder was a hate crime, but he didn’t take
questions.

Hassanen offered only a short statement in Arabic, his voice barely audible,
and his imam translated for him. They were standing in a garden at the
housing complex where the Hassanens live, in Reston, down the road from
the elementary school that Nabra had once attended. Hassanen said that he and
his family were devastated, and that they would wait for the authorities
to conduct their investigation. He spoke for less than a minute before
his friends helped him away from the scrum.

Nabra’s murder had become a national story. Hate crimes are increasing
nationwide, and there has been a spate of recent attacks targeting
Muslims. Many feared that Nabra was another victim of this trend. But
the Fairfax County Police Department resisted that interpretation: it
had deemed the crime a “road rage” incident. According to the official
version of events, Torres had been driving down Dranesville Road, in
Sterling—two towns over from Reston—at about 3:40 A.M. on Sunday, when
he encountered a group of fifteen teen-agers. They were walking back to
their mosque from a McDonald’s up the street, where they’d gone, after
midnight prayers, for suhur, the predawn meal taken during Ramadan.
Torres pulled up alongside the teen-agers and yelled something at some
of the boys, who shouted something back. Then Torres apparently stopped
his car and emerged with a baseball bat, and the young people scattered.
They ran back to the mosque, only to realize, upon getting there, that
Nabra wasn’t with them. Torres had caught up with her—according to
police, he struck her with the bat and kidnapped her. (Some reports
later raised the possibility that Nabra had been raped.) Her body was
found in a lake later that day.

After Hassanen had finished his statement at the press conference, his
imam and a young chaplain named Joshua Salaam spoke to reporters. They
both work for the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), a network of
eleven local mosques, to which the Hassanen family belongs. Reporters
shouted variations of the same question they would have asked Hassanen:
How did the family feel about the police not calling this murder a hate
crime? To each reporter, Salaam calmly replied that the ADAMS community
trusted the police to do their job. The questioners were looking for
evidence of a conflict between ADAMS and local law enforcement. Salaam
wouldn’t give them any.

As the camera crews packed up, Salaam lingered. “We understand that
people feel it’s a hate crime,” he told me. “It can feel like that,
and still have nothing to do with the investigation.” Why people were
upset with the police for attributing the murder to “road rage” was not
lost on him, though. “The Chapel Hill shooting”—in which a North
Carolina man killed three of his Muslim neighbors, execution style—“was called a dispute
over a parking space,” he said. “Every time that happens, every time a
crime gets treated liked that, we feel it. We hold all of that inside of
us.” Members of the community, especially the young people, wanted to be
free of fear. But, barring that, they wanted to be free to feel it, too.

On Wednesday, I visited the mosque in Sterling that Nabra and her
friends had attended the night of her murder, to meet with the chairman
of the board of ADAMS, a businessman named Rizwan Jaka, who was born in
Chicago and was raised in Texas. We sat outside as men streamed out from
evening prayer. ADAMS, which now serves about seven thousand Muslim
families in Northern Virginia, was founded in the early
nineteen-eighties. Since then, it has cultivated close relationships
with Jewish and Catholic groups in the region, as well as with local
law-enforcement agencies in Fairfax and Loudon Counties, where most of
its community members live. Jaka described serving halal turkeys at an
annual Thanksgiving dinner for the police and fire departments. “They
come in through the front door and are treated as heroes,” he said.

After the murder, Jaka told me, law-enforcement officials from both
counties, as well as Representative Barbara Comstock, the local
congresswoman, paid visits to the mosque in Sterling. “This goes back
years,” he said. “These are real relationships.” Jaka and members of
ADAMS were confident that the police were working the case honestly.
Soon after Torres was arrested, Jaka wrote a draft of a statement to
give to the press but shared it with about a hundred members of the
community first, including the organization’s board of trustees. The
statement stressed the need for unity and prayer. “We thank both Fairfax
County Police and Loudoun County Sheriff’s departments for their
diligent efforts in investigating and apprehending a suspect,” the
statement read. “We call on law enforcement to investigate and determine
the motive of this crime.”

“We caucused for hours,” Jaka told me. “We made our statement based on
what we know. That can change. But when there’s a terrorist attack we
say there shouldn’t be a rush to judgment. It’s the same here.” He asked
me a rhetorical question: “Was this a brutal, savage, sickening murder?
Or was it a brutal, savage, sickening, hate–crime murder?” To Jaka,
whether or not the killing was a hate crime is less important for the
time being than the support his organization can offer to members of the
community who are grieving.

As a legal matter, Virginia’s hate-crime statute specifies so-called
penalty enhancements for crimes motivated by race, religion, and
ethnicity. But there’s an important political element at issue, too: if
law enforcement fails to call something a hate crime in the face of
striking evidence, as many say was the case in Chapel Hill, a community
can be left feeling unprotected.

Reston is a quiet, diverse, idyllic suburban town. People greet one
another while walking outside, and there are a lot of young families.
Rabbi Michael Holzman, of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation—an
interfaith organization where members of the ADAMS center, including the
Hassanen family, sometimes go for prayers because it’s closer to their
homes—said, “Most of the world is not like this.” Holzman challenges the
young people he meets to “make the world more like Reston.” Nabra’s
murder, understandably, had rattled some of these young people. At the
Hassanens’ apartment complex, I’d met some young boys who told me about
the debates they’d been having. How should people talk about the murder?
What did the crime mean? I spoke to an eleven-year-old neighbor of the
Hassanen family who told me, “It’s good that this is getting attention.
But it’s messed up that Nabra is being treated as just another dead
Muslim kid in America.” He wanted people to talk about what she was like
when she was alive. The camera crews and white news vans parked outside
were there to cover a tragedy.

On Dranesville Road, between the mosque and the McDonald’s, rituals of
American tragedy were being enacted. Balloons were tied to a guardrail,
and people left notes addressed to Nabra scattered on the ground. Down
the street from the McDonald’s is an IHOP, where late-night prayer-goers
have also been going for predawn meals. Nabra and her friends had been
going there, too. When I walked in to get a coffee, a waiter named Juan
gestured toward the empty tables. “You should see this place at three in
the morning,” he said, in shaky English. “People like to come here,
instead of the McDonald’s, before the fast because we serve a proper
breakfast.”

On Wednesday I visited Sterling, where Torres lived. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement had revealed that Torres, who is being held without
bond, was in the country illegally. His family has been unreachable
since his arrest, but, at his arraignment on Monday, a bewildered aunt told reporters, “I can’t believe it. . . . He is nice with my family. He’s a
nice dad.”

At a cozy pupusería in a strip mall, I asked a waitress whether people
were worried that the murder would provoke a backlash against the entire
Salvadoran community. These are fearful times for immigrants in
America—the President has promised to crack down on the undocumented,
and stoked resentments by playing up immigrant crime as a widespread
scourge. But the waitress had barely heard about Nabra’s murder. When I
described it, she began pressing me for details. She gasped upon
learning that Nabra was only seventeen. “I’ve just been working in the
restaurant these last few days,” she said. “I haven’t had time to look
at the news.” She was relieved to hear that the killer was in custody.

As President, Donald Trump has been noticeably reluctant to speak about
crimes committed against Muslims and other minorities. In February, when
two Indian men in Kansas were shot by someone who thought that they were Iranian, Trump waited a week before condemning the attack. And he was
slow to offer praise for the two men who died in Portland, Oregon, after defending a Muslim woman under assault on a train. In Sterling and
Reston, no one seemed to expect much from their President—but if this
caused resentment, residents were keeping it to themselves.

On Wednesday night, Nabra’s friends and family members organized a vigil at
a park in Reston. Hundreds of people attended, including Farris Barakat,
the brother of one of the victims of the Chapel Hill shooting. He’d left
Raleigh as soon as he heard the news. “I spoke to a similar crowd after
my brother’s killing,” he said. “Muslim lives matter. Nabra’s life
matters.” A stage had been set up, and on it stood a lectern that was
draped with a drawing of a hijab and glasses, which playfully conjured
Nabra. Her friends described her as a raconteur and joke teller. One of
them said, “Who am I going to be there for now that she’s gone? Who’s
going to be there for me?”

Her killer was never mentioned by name; his motives were never brought
up. The closest anyone came was to describe him as having “evil in his
heart.” The m.c., a teen-age friend dressed in a tie, insisted that the
night was to be all about Nabra. I noticed her father, dressed in black,
standing next to the stage. Several times, he hurried up to hug the
speakers.