|
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division lists nine
killings across the country as "possible hate crimes" in
revenge for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The private Council on American-Islamic
Relations considers eight deaths to be part of the backlash.
Another nonprofit organization, the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee, puts the figure at six. Yet homicide detectives and prosecutors working on these cases say
they have hard evidence that only one or, possibly, two
killings in the United States since Sept. 11 were motivated by
anti-Arab or anti-Muslim bias.
The notion that there has been a rash of retaliatory
murders across the country, some investigators say, is an urban myth driven by anti-discrimination campaigners,
sensational media reports and traumatized crime victims
seeking some explanation for senseless acts of violence. For their part, many families of post-Sept. 11 murder victims
believe that police are reluctant to recognize and pursue hate
crimes, a complaint that African Americans have made for
years.
"I think white Americans did this, and because of that,
there's no investigation," said Durre Hasan, whose husband,
Waqar, was shot to death at his grocery store in Dallas. "If
my husband was a white American and some Asian, Muslim or
black shot him, they would find that person within two
days."
Some civil libertarians say the precise number of murders
caused by the post-Sept. 11 backlash is unimportant. "If
there were three or four murders instead of six or nine,
that's not going to change my view of what happened," said
Hussein Ibish, communications director for the
anti-discrimination committee. "We're still talking about an
explosion of hate crimes."
Since the early 1980s, 45
states and the federal government have passed hate crime
statutes. The theory behind these laws is clear: Violent acts of bigotry are "inherently more serious" than random
violence "because they target not only the primary victim
but everybody in the victim's group," said Jack Levin, a researcher at Northeastern University who has written three
books on hate crime. In practice, however, determining the
motive for violent crime can be a tricky business, as the post-Sept. 11 killings show.
In many instances, police say, news reports first raised
the issue. "The assumption, especially among the broadcast
media, is that if someone with an Arabic-sounding name is
found dead, then it has to be a hate crime," said Seattle
detective Cloyd Steiger.
Beginning in late October, Steiger investigated the killing
of Mohamed Said Hassan, 21, a native of Somalia who was found under a bridge in rural Snohomish County, Wash. With help from
the police department's gang unit, Steiger concluded that
Hassan was beaten to death by fellow Somalis when, after a night of drinking, he urinated on the floor of a drug dealer's
house and tried to walk out with a pocketful of the dealer's
music CDs. Two Somali suspects have been charged with
second-degree homicide. Yet Hassan is still on the Justice Department's list of possible Sept. 11 backlash victims. In
most of the killings, the circumstances are murkier.
Adel Karas was a naturalized U.S. citizen, the father of
three boys and an upbeat, infectiously happy man. For 20 years, he owned the International Market, a Los Angeles
grocery that sold dates, goat cheese and statuettes from his
native Egypt alongside corn flakes and canned tuna. "He was always singing and laughing, and nobody would leave the store
except singing or laughing," recalled his wife, Randa, a physician.
On Sept. 15, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's
Department, two Hispanic men left running. Karas, 48,
staggered out and collapsed on the sidewalk from a gunshot
wound.
|
 |
The FBI and Los Angeles County are offering a $30,000
reward for information about his killers, but they have not
been identified.
Randa Karas is convinced that her husband, a Coptic
Christian, was mistaken for a Muslim. "I'm sure it was a
hate crime," she said, noting that the store is just a few
blocks from a mosque that had been vandalized two days
earlier. Moreover, she said, there was no sign of a struggle
and nothing seems to have been stolen. Money was still in
the cash register and a thick wad of bills in her husband's
pocket.
The sheriff's department investigator on the case,
Detective Richard Ramirez, views the same facts differently.
Because there were no witnesses inside the store, police
have no way "to get into the mind-set of these
perpetrators," he said. "We have no evidence, none whatsoever, to reflect that this
was a hate crime. Our official position is that
this was a robbery that unfortunately ended with the killing
of the store owner," the detective said. There is a similar
gulf between the police and victims' families in at least
three other murders.
Waqar Hasan, 46, a Pakistani waiting for his green card, was
shot in the face while cooking hamburgers at his Dallas
grocery on Sept. 15. Abdo Ali Ahmed, 50, a naturalized
American from Yemen, was shot in the stomach at his gas
station and convenience store in Reedley, Calif., on Sept.
29. And a Palestinian American clothing salesman, Abdullah
Nimer, 53, was slain while making his rounds in
south-central Los Angeles on Oct. 3.
In each case, there are no known witnesses. And in each
case, the victim's family is convinced that the killing was
a hate crime, largely because no money or goods were stolen.
Police say that is not unusual in botched robberies. "A lot
of times when a robbery goes bad, when the suspects go into
the store and the clerk is resistant or defiant . . . they
shoot and they panic and they leave," said Sgt. Toby Rien of
the Fresno County Sheriff's Department, who is investigating
Ahmed's death.
A few days before the shooting, Rien said, Ahmed found a
threatening note on his car at a supermarket several miles
from his business. But Rien said police do not know whether
the note, which was discarded, is connected to the killing.
"We're hearing from informants in the Hispanic community
that it was a robbery went wrong, like a beer thing," he
said.
Sgt. Joe DeCorte, a Dallas homicide detective, noted
that Hasan's store had been robbed twice earlier this year,
and that a clerk had been killed there in a 1995 shooting.
"I don't have one piece of evidence to say this was a hate
crime, and I don't have one piece of evidence to say it
wasn't a hate crime," DeCorte said. "I'm leaning toward a
robbery... They're in a very hazardous business, these
convenience stores."
Indeed, convenience store clerks are the most likely of all
occupational groups to be murdered, just ahead of taxi
drivers and security officers, according to Levin, the
Northeastern University researcher. Big city police officers
who see such murders every year are inclined to view them as
heinous but ordinary crimes needing little explanation,
while to the families of the victims "even the hate-crime
explanation is better than no explanation at all," Levin
said. "Families don't want to believe that the loved one had
his life ended for no reason."
|
