Media started out wrongly coupling the description as ‘attacked near mosque’ when it was clear that the interaction had nothing to do with the mosque, but that they interacted coming from a McDonald’s.
Via Daily Caller:
In the aftermath of the brutal beating and death of a teenage Muslim girl in Virginia, liberal activists and some civil rights organizations rushed to frame the killing as a hate crime.
Many said that Nabra Mohmod Hassanen’s killer was obviously motivated by loathing for Muslims, one of many minority groups suffering under the “climate of hate” that President Donald Trump’s administration has created.
The storyline began to collapse when The Daily Caller and other outlets reported that the alleged killer, Darwin Martinez Torres, was not a white supremacist bigot, as some alleged, but rather a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from El Salvador. Despite the total absence of evidence of a hate crime — Fairfax County police called it a “road rage” incident — many commentators continued to assert that Hassanen’s murder was an illustrative example of bias against Muslims in American society.