Proving horrific crime was motivated by hate no simple task
The horrific weekend slaying of Virginia high school student Nabra Hassanen has prompted calls from civil liberties advocates to investigate her killing as a possible hate crime.
Virginia police officials initially said there is no indication the 17-year-old was targeted because of her religion and that her killing was a “road-rage incident” as she and a group of other teens walked and biked along a street headed back to a mosque early Sunday.
But Nabra’s family feels certain she was abducted and killed because she was wearing Islamic clothing as she returned to the All Dulles Area Muslim Society mosque in Sterling after the group had gone out for a late night bite to eat amid their Ramadan observance.
A Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization criticized police on Tuesday for settling too soon on road rage as motivator and said the killing should be seen in the context of a rise in hate crimes targeting Muslims across the country.
“We think it’s premature,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic relations known as CAIR. “We believe these incidents are at the core motivated by the perception that these subjects are Muslim.”
Nabra’s family has said she was wearing a an abaya and a hijab head covering.
Her beating, abduction and murder were clearly hateful acts, but bringing formal hate crime charges is more complicated.
Proving a hate crime in court requires showing overt bias, that a person was motivated, for instance, by the victim’s religion, ethnicity, national origin or gender.
According to the police, Darwin Martinez Torres, a 22-year-old construction worker, argued with a teen on a bike who was part of the group before jumping a curb with his car and chasing the larger group. He caught up to Nabra in a parking lot, where he is accused of hitting her with a baseball bat, abducting her and later killing her.
The other teens reported what had happened — and that Nabra had fallen as they all fled — when they got back to the mosque around 4 a.m. Sunday, prompting a police search by Fairfax and neighboring Loudoun counties and the arrest of Martinez Torres within hours after a Fairfax officer noticed Martinez Torres circling near the crime scene, police have said.
Nabra’s body was found in a pond Sunday afternoon based on leads that police have not detailed.