An Eerie Similarity in 2 Kansas Hate Crimes, 3 Years Apart
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Version 0 of 1. It felt as if every day there was a report of a new hate crime. A mosque torched. A hijab snatched. Bomb threats called into Jewish community centers. And violent deaths, driven by otherness and hate. The New York Times reported many of the crimes across the country, but there was more to be told. As a national enterprise correspondent, I wanted to take a closer look at the next chapter, how people put their lives back together after the headlines faded. So I traveled from my home in Hollywood, Fla., to Olathe, Kan., to follow up on one of the episodes of hate, the shooting of two Indian immigrants at a neighborhood bar in February. Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an engineer, died, and his co-worker and friend, Alok Madasani, survived. I focused on Mr. Kuchibhotla’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, as she struggled with his death and what had occurred. Witnesses had said that the gunman, identified by the authorities as Adam Purinton, had angrily questioned whether the two men were in the country legally. After the shooting, he told someone he thought they were from Iran, according to news reports. Ms. Dumala had returned to their hometown, Hyderabad, India, for Mr. Kuchibhotla’s funeral and would not be back for several weeks. As I researched the story, I came across another case that was eerily similar. Three years earlier and about 12 miles away in Overland Park, Kan., three people were gunned down by a white supremacist in the parking lot of a Jewish community center and outside a Jewish retirement community. The gunman thought they were Jewish, but all three were Christians. Two of the victims were members of Mindy Corporon’s immediate family. In the first shooting, the gunman killed Ms. Corporon’s father, William Lewis Corporon, 69, who was a medical doctor, and her son, Reat Griffin Underwood, 14. They were at the community center for Reat’s singing audition. Just a few moments after the shooting, Ms. Corporon pulled into the parking lot and saw her father on the ground and her wounded son in the truck his grandfather had been driving. Frazier Glenn Cross was sentenced to death in 2015 for the killings. From this unimaginable tragedy, Ms. Corporon, who is the chief executive of a wealth management firm, started a series of annual events to conquer the fear that feeds hate. I wanted to speak with Ms. Corporon. I believed she would intimately know Ms. Dumala’s pain. And, perhaps, her path forward. When I met Ms. Corporon, she talked openly about that dreadful afternoon in the parking lot. She talked about discovering her father first, and believing at the time that he had had a heart attack or stroke. She talked about reconciling that her loved ones had died solely because of hate. She talked about the long journey in forcing herself to emotionally leave the parking lot — and her civic work to make “ripples of kindness overpower the ripples of hate.” And she talked about the mountain that Ms. Dumala now faces. And the power of Ms. Dumala’s voice to tell the story of her beloved Srinivas. “It is the suddenness and shock and processing that your loved one died a violent death and that someone wanted them dead that’s so hard,” Ms. Corporon said. “Why did someone want them dead? They didn’t do anything to anybody.” A few weeks after Ms. Dumala returned from India, she agreed to speak at a community anti-hate-crime program at an Olathe church. This was a first step in her newly formed mission to spread the message of love; it was a way to honor her husband and, hopefully, reduce hate crimes. On stage, Ms. Dumala was seated next to Ms. Corporon, who was also scheduled to speak. Ms. Corporon recalled reaching over and touching Ms. Dumala’s hand. “You will be fine,” she said. Ms. Dumala remembered meeting Ms. Corporon, though it was brief. If she were to talk to her again, she told me, she would ask a question that still lingers with her: “How do you heal?” |