by Audra D.S. Burch

July 13, 2017

 

It felt as if every day there was a report of a new hate crime. A mosque torched. A hijab snatched. Bomb threats called into Jewish community centers.

And violent deaths, driven by otherness and hate.

The New York Times reported many of the crimes across the country, but there was more to be told. As a national enterprise correspondent, I wanted to take a closer look at the next chapter, how people put their lives back together after the headlines faded.

So I traveled from my home in Hollywood, Fla., to Olathe, Kan., to follow up on one of the episodes of hate, the shooting of two Indian immigrants at a neighborhood bar in February. Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an engineer, died, and his co-worker and friend, Alok Madasani, survived. I focused on Mr. Kuchibhotla’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, as she struggled with his death and what had occurred. Witnesses had said that the gunman, identified by the authorities as Adam Purinton, had angrily questioned whether the two men were in the country legally. After the shooting, he told someone he thought they were from Iran, according to news reports.

Full article:

www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/insider/an-eerie-similarity-in-2-kansas-hate-crimes-3-years-apart.html