The death of a Muslim teenager in Virginia whose body was found in a pond some 12 hours after she and a group of friends got into an altercation with a driver while walking back to a mosque from an IHOP is "NOT" being investigated as a hate crime, per a tweet from Fairfax County police on Monday. No elaboration was given. But that hasn't kept a religious bent out of discussion of and reactions to Nabra Hassanen's killing.
As the Washington Post puts it, "the issue was on the minds of many Muslims on Sunday." The latest:
- A police press release on the arrest of Darwin Martinez Torres, 22, says that as Nabra and her friends were walking "they got into a dispute with a man in a car." Torres allegedly exited his car and assaulted Nabra. "Her friends could not find her and police were called to help."
- The Washington Post talks to Nabra's mother, who says a detective said her daughter was beaten with a metal bat. "I lost my daughter, my first reason for happiness,” she said Sunday night. WUSA9 reports police did recover a bat.
- "What investigators told the father and the mother, he hit her in the head and put her in the car and he threw her in the water," the Richmond Times-Dispatch quotes a rep for the family as saying. It reports Martinez Torres directed officers to the pond, which it says is near the apartment he lives in.
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