Mohmoud Hassanen, the father of the seventeen-year-old Northern Virginia high-school student who was murdered near her mosque early on Sunday morning, appeared before the cameras for the first time at a press conference on Tuesday night, looking haggard and stupefied. The police had already arrested a suspect—Darwin Martinez Torres, a twenty-two-year-old Salvadoran man—and charged him with killing Hassanen’s daughter, Nabra. The reporters were there to ask if Hassanen thought that his daughter’s murder was a hate crime, but he didn’t take questions.

Hassanen offered only a short statement in Arabic, his voice barely audible, and his imam translated for him. They were standing in a garden at the housing complex where the Hassanens live, in Reston, down the road from the elementary school that Nabra had once attended. Hassanen said that he and his family were devastated, and that they would wait for the authorities to conduct their investigation. He spoke for less than a minute before his friends helped him away from the scrum.

Nabra’s murder had become a national story. Hate crimes are increasing nationwide, and there has been a spate of recent attacks targeting Muslims. Many feared that Nabra was another victim of this trend. But the Fairfax County Police Department resisted that interpretation: it had deemed the crime a “road rage” incident. According to the official version of events, Torres had been driving down Dranesville Road, in Sterling—two towns over from Reston—at about 3:40 A.M. on Sunday, when he encountered a group of fifteen teen-agers. They were walking back to their mosque from a McDonald’s up the street, where they’d gone, after midnight prayers, for suhur, the predawn meal taken during Ramadan. Torres pulled up alongside the teen-agers and yelled something at some of the boys, who shouted something back. Then Torres apparently stopped his car and emerged with a baseball bat, and the young people scattered. They ran back to the mosque, only to realize, upon getting there, that Nabra wasn’t with them. Torres had caught up with her—according to police, he struck her with the bat and kidnapped her. (Some reports later raised the possibility that Nabra had been raped.) Her body was found in a lake later that day.

After Hassanen had finished his statement at the press conference, his imam and a young chaplain named Joshua Salaam spoke to reporters. They both work for the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), a network of eleven local mosques, to which the Hassanen family belongs. Reporters shouted variations of the same question they would have asked Hassanen: How did the family feel about the police not calling this murder a hate crime? To each reporter, Salaam calmly replied that the ADAMS community trusted the police to do their job. The questioners were looking for evidence of a conflict between ADAMS and local law enforcement. Salaam wouldn’t give them any.

As the camera crews packed up, Salaam lingered. “We understand that people feel it’s a hate crime,” he told me. “It can feel like that, and still have nothing to do with the investigation.” Why people were upset with the police for attributing the murder to “road rage” was not lost on him, though. “The Chapel Hill shooting”—in which a North Carolina man killed three of his Muslim neighbors, execution style—“was called a dispute over a parking space,” he said. “Every time that happens, every time a crime gets treated liked that, we feel it. We hold all of that inside of us.” Members of the community, especially the young people, wanted to be free of fear. But, barring that, they wanted to be free to feel it, too.

On Wednesday, I visited the mosque in Sterling that Nabra and her friends had attended the night of her murder, to meet with the chairman of the board of ADAMS, a businessman named Rizwan Jaka, who was born in Chicago and was raised in Texas. We sat outside as men streamed out from evening prayer. ADAMS, which now serves about seven thousand Muslim families in Northern Virginia, was founded in the early nineteen-eighties. Since then, it has cultivated close relationships with Jewish and Catholic groups in the region, as well as with local law-enforcement agencies in Fairfax and Loudon Counties, where most of its community members live. Jaka described serving halal turkeys at an annual Thanksgiving dinner for the police and fire departments. “They come in through the front door and are treated as heroes,” he said.

After the murder, Jaka told me, law-enforcement officials from both counties, as well as Representative Barbara Comstock, the local congresswoman, paid visits to the mosque in Sterling. “This goes back years,” he said. “These are real relationships.” Jaka and members of ADAMS were confident that the police were working the case honestly. Soon after Torres was arrested, Jaka wrote a draft of a statement to give to the press but shared it with about a hundred members of the community first, including the organization’s board of trustees. The statement stressed the need for unity and prayer. “We thank both Fairfax County Police and Loudoun County Sheriff’s departments for their diligent efforts in investigating and apprehending a suspect,” the statement read. “We call on law enforcement to investigate and determine the motive of this crime.”

“We caucused for hours,” Jaka told me. “We made our statement based on what we know. That can change. But when there’s a terrorist attack we say there shouldn’t be a rush to judgment. It’s the same here.” He asked me a rhetorical question: “Was this a brutal, savage, sickening murder? Or was it a brutal, savage, sickening, hate-crime murder?” To Jaka, whether or not the killing was a hate crime is less important for the time being than the support his organization can offer to members of the community who are grieving.

As a legal matter, Virginia’s hate-crime statute specifies so-called penalty enhancements for crimes motivated by race, religion, and ethnicity. But there’s an important political element at issue, too: if law enforcement fails to call something a hate crime in the face of striking evidence, as many say was the case in Chapel Hill, a community can be left feeling unprotected.

Reston is a quiet, diverse, idyllic suburban town. People greet one another while walking outside, and there are a lot of young families. Rabbi Michael Holzman, of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation—an interfaith organization where members of the ADAMS center, including the Hassanen family, sometimes go for prayers because it’s closer to their homes—said, “Most of the world is not like this.” Holzman challenges the young people he meets to “make the world more like Reston.” Nabra’s murder, understandably, had rattled some of these young people. At the Hassanens’ apartment complex, I’d met some young boys who told me about the debates they’d been having. How should people talk about the murder? What did the crime mean? I spoke to an eleven-year-old neighbor of the Hassanen family who told me, “It’s good that this is getting attention. But it’s messed up that Nabra is being treated as just another dead Muslim kid in America.” He wanted people to talk about what she was like when she was alive. The camera crews and white news vans parked outside were there to cover a tragedy.

On Dranesville Road, between the mosque and the McDonald’s, rituals of American tragedy were being enacted. Balloons were tied to a guardrail, and people left notes addressed to Nabra scattered on the ground. Down the street from the McDonald’s is an IHOP, where late-night prayer-goers have also been going for predawn meals. Nabra and her friends had been going there, too. When I walked in to get a coffee, a waiter named Juan gestured toward the empty tables. “You should see this place at three in the morning,” he said, in shaky English. “People like to come here, instead of the McDonald’s, before the fast because we serve a proper breakfast.”