Vol. 81/No. 25      July 10, 2017

 

Thousands respond to killing of Muslim teen in Va.

 

RESTON, Va. — Thousands turned out here June 21 to honor the life of Nabra Hassanen, 17, who was brutally beaten to death June 18 by a man who attacked her and her friends with a baseball bat on the way to their mosque in Sterling.

Hassanen and her friends had been at McDonald’s for a pre-dawn meal before heading to the All Dulles Area Muslim Society mosque for the start of the day’s Ramadan fast. Police say that Salvadoran immigrant Darwin Martínez Torres, 22, killed the teenager in a fit of road rage.

“I don’t believe this story,” Nabra’s father Mohmoud Hassanen, who works as a driver for a car service, told the Guardian newspaper. “He followed the girls, and all of them had head cloths, meaning they are Muslim, and he had a baseball stick.”

Whatever the motivation for the attack, many here see the murder as part of an atmosphere of increased anti-Muslim hostility around the country.

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, urged police to “conduct a thorough investigation of possible bias motive in this case, coming as it does at a time of rising Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate attacks nationwide.” Awad said that CAIR has documented a 57 percent increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents from 2015 to 2016.

More than 5,000 people attended Hassanen’s funeral June 21. Later that evening thousands more joined a vigil at the Lake Anne Plaza in Reston, where the Hassanen family lives. The vigil, initiated by the South Lakes High School Muslim Students Association, featured family, friends and classmates, school principal Kim Retzer, Imam Mohamed Magid of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, Rabbi Michael Holzman of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, and a representative of the Restoration Methodist Church. The synagogue made its sanctuary available for Muslim evening prayers afterwards.  
 
 
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