Chicagoans Will Gather To Mourn Fatally Beaten Muslim Teen Nabra Hassanen

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jun 22, 2017 4:10PM

Nabra Hassanen

With the psychic wound still raw over the brutal beating death of 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen in Virginia, Chicagoans will gather on Thursday evening in Federal Plaza to hold a vigil for the late Muslim teen.

Mourners will stage a candlelight vigil in honor of Hassanen, who was beaten with a baseball bat on Sunday, in an attack that police called "road rage," while she was on her way from a Ramadan meal to her local mosque, in Fairfax County, Virginia. Gatherers at the event are also calling on authorities to investigate the fatal beating as a hate crime. They've also launched a Care2 petition calling on the Virginia Division of Human Rights and the Department of Justice to that end.

“The murder of our young sister Nabra has horrified our community,” said Bassem Kawar of TAKE ON HATE-Chicago, a project of the National Network for Arab American Communities, in a release. “She is dead because she was Black, Arab, and Muslim, and her killing is the responsibility not only of the man who killed her, but of politicians, law enforcement agencies, and media that continue to de-value the lives of people like her and us."

Organizers said that racist and anti-immigrant sentiment had become normalized under the Trump administration. Earlier this month, cellphone video taken at a Chicagoland restaurant captured a white man launching a vile verbal assault against Muslim teen girls.

The vigil takes place Thursday at 6 p.m. at Federal Plaza (50 W. Adams St.). It is endorsed by more than a dozen community organizations, including Women's March of Illinois, Black Lives Matter - Chicago and the Arab American Action Network.

Some 5,000 people attended Hassanen's funeral in Sterling, Virginia on Wednesday.