Around noon on Tuesday, Joseph Seals, a detective in the Jersey City Police Department, approached two homicide suspects, a man and a woman, who were sitting inside a U-Haul van in Bay View cemetery. According to the Times, the suspects shot and killed Seals, then drove directly to a nearby kosher grocery store in the neighborhood of Greenville. Officers from the Jersey City Police Department, sheriffs from at least three counties, the New Jersey State police, the N.Y.P.D., the Port Authority, the A.T.F., and the F.B.I. were soon on the scene. They ran through the streets in formation, heavily armed, and wearing jeans and hoodies, police uniforms, and olive drab. The suspects reportedly had long guns as well. Over the next hour or so, the two sides exchanged hundreds of rounds. When the gunfire stopped, two more officers had been wounded, and five more people, including the suspects, had been killed. Inside the U-Haul, investigators later found what appeared to be a pipe bomb and a “manifesto-style note.” At least one of the shooters had posted anti-Semitic and anti-police comments online.

Because the shootout lasted so long, details were slow to emerge. Seals was working in a unit that sought to remove handguns from the streets. Was this a sting operation gone bad? Perhaps the shooters were after the schools, twelve within a five-block radius that neighbored the crime scene and had been locked down. Maybe it was street violence. There had previously been only nine homicides this year in Jersey City. But murders tend to cluster in Greenville, a majority-black neighborhood with a population of less than fifty thousand. In 2018, three people were fatally shot in separate incidents within a span of three weeks. This summer, a shooting in Greenville wounded four people, though it garnered little attention; the brief news reports did not even include the victims’ names. On Tuesday, each explanation for the shooting offered its own horrors, but, even after the scene was brought under control and the number of dead and injured known, some explanations were apparently more horrifying than others. In an Uber, on the way to the site of the shooting, my driver said, “They’re saying it’s not terrorism. Thank God.”

Except, as it turned out, there appeared to be a more insidious motive behind Tuesday’s violence. A few years ago, sixty-two Hasidic families moved into Greenville, refugees of high Brooklyn rents. A community center near the crime scene had become a de-facto staging area for victims’ families, and several volunteers, who were trained to offer medical support and grief counselling, had come from Hasidic communities in upstate New York or Brooklyn. Based on the reporting that had emerged at the time, a number of people outside of the center, none of whom wanted to be quoted for this article, expressed relief that the shooting did not appear to be an act of anti-Semitism. Recently, old tensions had begun to simmer in the neighborhood. Some residents have complained about the insularity and new influence of the Hasidic community over the local real-estate market. The Hasidic community, meanwhile, has chafed at local politicians who told them their new shul was violating zoning laws. The shul sits next to the site of the shooting.

The police initially said there was no evidence of a hate crime, that the grocery was chosen at random rather than out of religious animus. Later in the evening, Jersey City’s mayor, Steven Fulop, tweeted a statement revising the city’s original assessment: they now believed the kosher supermarket was intentionally targeted, perhaps out of anti-Semitism. According to the Times, surveillance footage had shown the U-Haul driving “slowly and deliberately” to the market, which was a mile from the cemetery where the two suspects had shot and killed Seals. Officials are also investigating possible ties between the shooters and the Black Hebrew Israelites, a radical sect that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (The Black Hebrew Israelites have no connection to traditional Judaism.) The Chabad organization said that at least two of the three bystanders killed had been members of the Hasidic community: Leah Minda Ferencz and Moshe Deutsch. At a press conference at City Hall, on Wednesday, Rabbi David Niederman, the executive director and president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, asked, “Are Jews safe in New York City?” He went on, “It seems that in the New York metropolitan area, they are not.”

In the politics of mass shootings, motives matter, and, as the facts shifted, local residents tried to process the little they knew. At around 8 P.M., on the corner of Stegman Street and Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive, a small group of people was standing near a thick ribbon of yellow police tape and marvelling, with some bitterness, at the crowds of outsiders. One of the congregants, Antonio Whyte, turned to me. If this had been a call with only black victims, he asked, “Would you be out here?” This tragedy offered some unusual circumstances: proximity to Manhattan and the media, duration of the shootout, a slain police officer. (Seals was a father of five and known as a local hero; he had once climbed a woman’s fire escape to stop a sexual assault in her home on Christmas Eve.) Furthermore, the details of the suspects’ motives had not yet been established. But Whyte, who was joined by his wife and two daughters, ages three and five, had a point. “I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t waste your time,” he said. “This is all a show. I get it, bro. Cameras are on. Police cars, caution tape. This is what makes news. But it’s sad, because everybody should make the news. Every life matters. The only thing that separates it is all the shit you see right now.”

A short time later, Whyte was talking with Phelarn Curry, who spent much of her childhood on Stegman Street, where she lives now. Curry had wondered how to balance her own feeling of neglect with the increasing possibility that a different kind of hate had visited the neighborhood. “People died,” she said. “And that’s the sad part. I don’t care where you’re from, I don’t care what community you’re from, this is horrible. It’s horrible.”