Aisha Sultan Aisha Sultan is home and family editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow Aisha Sultan Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today

Julie Williams and her daughters had enjoyed a casual lunch and were strolling along the Delmar Loop when she heard a startling comment.

“You need ISIS,” a street preacher called out to her, she said.

She had heard the group of three young men spewing slurs against homosexuals when they had passed by them. It was ugly stuff, but she figured it was their prerogative and kept walking. When one of them invoked the terrorist group it stopped her cold.

Not today. It was less than three days since the mass shooting in a gay club in Orlando killed 49 people. Not here. This was a diverse and welcoming street, a popular tourist attraction that always felt safe to her transgender daughter, Alice.

She told her daughters, 18 and 20, to keep walking and wait for her down the street. They moved farther ahead but not as far as she would have liked.

“Excuse me? What did you say?” she asked the man on the street, who had been recording the two preachers next to him with a cellphone. “Are you referring to the Islamic State?”

“You will be blown off the face of the Earth,” she says he told her.