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Vol. 81/No. 25 July 10, 2017
Thousands respond to killing of Muslim teen in Va.
BY NED MEASEL
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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