One dead, two injured in anti-immigrant shooting in Kansas
By
Shelley Connor
25 February 2017
A shooting in an Olathe, Kansas bar on Wednesday night killed one man and left two others injured. According to witnesses, the shooter harassed two Indian men with racial slurs, shouting, “Get out of my country!” before killing 32-year-old Srinivas Kuchibhotla and injuring 32-year-old Alok Madasani. Also injured was 24-year-old Ian Grillot, who had attempted to intervene in defense of the two men.
Adam Purinton, a 51 year old Navy veteran, was arrested and charged with first degree murder in the case. Witnesses say he fled the bar on foot as police arrived. A bartender in Clinton, Missouri reported that Purinton told him that he had killed two Middle Eastern men.
The FBI is investigating whether the shooting was racially motivated. The FBI found that hate crimes escalated sharply in 2016. According to other sources, including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), they have spiked even more since Trump was elected, with crimes against immigrants outnumbering other bias-motivated crimes.
Madasani and Kuchibhotla worked together at Garmin as engineers; both had emigrated over ten years ago from India. Kuchibhotla’s wife, Damala, told reporters that she had feared that such a thing would occur, and that she had asked her husband many times in the year prior to his murder to consider leaving the United States.
The shooting has not taken place in isolation. Hours after Trump issued an Executive Order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, a mosque in Victoria, Texas was torched.
On February 18, a Birmingham, Alabama mosque received an email declaring that “Muslims, Mexicans, and Blacks” would be driven out of the country, or else hunted down and killed….