The wife of an Indian American allegedly killed by a gunman in Kansas is decrying the recent rise of hate crimes.
“He was just enjoying his glass of beer,” said Shabina Kavimandan, the wife of Srinivas Kuchibotla who was shot dead at a bar in Kansas in an incident that also left two others injured.
Police say 51-year-old Adam Purinton had directed disparaging remarks about Middle Easterners toward Kavimandan and another Indian American. The bartender asked Purinton to leave, but he later returned with a gun, and allegedly shot Kavimandan, his companion and a third person who tried to intervene.
“When we peel the layer, then we realize, oh, gun violence was actually somebody killing people because they are different … That’s when it became really hard to really make sense of this,” said Kavimandan, according to AlJazeera.
The news conference was held on the same day investigators near Tampa were investigating a fire at a mosque as a hate crime.
“Whoever did this maybe intended to discourage us, but this makes us much stronger,” said Mazen Bondoghji, a board member of the mosque to ABC.
Tampa’s mayor confirmed the fire at the mosque was arson, reported WJLA.
“What ever occurred here, we will find out. The perpetrator will be punished, but we can not allow as a community anybody to be victimized, to feel vunerable, to be attacked for any reason,” said Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn.
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