“He’s back, and he has a gun!”
Adam Purinton strode toward the patio of Austins Bar & Grill, a black and white cloth tied around his head and military-style medals pinned haphazardly to his white shirt.
He burst into the patio’s flimsy side door shouting, “Get out of my country!” and fired his handgun at two Indian men seated at a high table, according to eyewitnesses and police records. Customers screamed over the din of the TVs and dove for the ground. At least three bullets hit the man facing the door, Srinivas Kuchibhotla. Another bullet plunged into the leg of his friend, Alok Madasani, who crawled for the door before collapsing on the concrete. Alok’s wife was pregnant with their first child, due in four months, and all he could think of was living to see his baby’s face. Survive, he thought.
Ian Grillot, a 24-year-old former Marine, ducked under a table nearby, counting the blasts of bullets. The shots stopped. When Purinton turned and ran out of the bar, heading toward the back parking lot, Grillot bolted after him. Hearing footsteps closing in, Purinton allegedly whirled around and sent a bullet tearing through Grillot’s hand and into his chest. On the patio, a bloodied Kuchibhotla sank to the ground. People scrambled over upended tables and broken glasses to the wounded men. One knelt at Kuchibhotla’s side, pushing napkins into his wounds. Another ripped off his own shirt, tying it around Madasani’s leg as a tourniquet. Several people ran out to Grillot, who kept talking talking talking to retain consciousness as his blood seeped out.
Purinton took off. Police began searching for his black Silverado pickup truck.
Eleven years earlier, in the Indian city of Hyderabad, Sunayana Dumala sat in her dining room examining a list of people from her hometown who were now studying at the University of Texas at El Paso. She picked the first name, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, and messaged him on the social network Orkut. She introduced herself briefly, then asked, Would you mind checking on the status of my application at the admissions office?
Loquacious and baby-faced, the youngest of three sisters, Sunayana was guardedly ambitious. “I at least wanted to try,” she says, to be the first in her family to get into a master’s program in the United States. The degree could ensure a bright future in India—or a foothold in American life. At 22, she considered herself pampered, though her family wasn’t especially wealthy. She had never left India. She’d never even made a bank transaction.
A message from Srinivas popped up on her screen: Sure, I’ll look into it.
Soon, the two were chatting online at all hours. Srinivas became Srinu. Sunayana became Nani. She liked how hardworking and thoughtful he seemed, asking after her school applications. He pored over her bubbly dispatches from home, a welcome distraction from his studies to be an electrical engineer. After months of chats and phone calls, Nani confessed that she loved to sing and hummed songs constantly. Nice for your family—they won’t need a radio, Srinu wrote back. Sensing an opening, Nani replied boldly: Why can’t it be yours?
But Srinu had misgivings about their budding relationship. He was determined to stay in the US, where he sensed that a smart, driven guy could get ahead, no matter if his family wasn’t rich. After two days of silence, he finally messaged her. What if she couldn’t get her student visa? What if their parents didn’t approve? Stop there, Nani typed. If you’re thinking so far ahead, you must like me, right? He answered: I think I love you. In November 2006, her student visa was approved.
The following month, over winter break, Srinu flew back to Hyderabad. He arranged to finally meet Nani face to face outside his favorite Hindu temple, away from their families. Nani got there first and paced nervously amid the street stands selling coconuts, flowers, and incense. Then she spotted Srinu stepping out of an auto-rickshaw. Just 5 feet tall, Nani craned her neck up as he straightened to his full height—a lanky 6'2"—and grinned.
The first six years of their courtship would be long-distance. In 2007, Nani was accepted at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota to study engineering management. By the time Srinu graduated from the University of Texas El Paso that year, he had already landed his first avionics job at a company called Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Fluent in Python code, he worked on the company’s fly-by-wire team, replacing the outdated manual controls of a plane’s ailerons and rudders with a computer-regulated system. “As an engineer, he was smarter than I was—without a doubt,” his mentor there says. Srinu would brainstorm a new idea with a team member one afternoon, work late—his lunch would often sit next to him for hours, untouched—and present a prototype the next morning. His managers appointed him as a liaison between Rockwell’s Cedar Rapids headquarters and the company’s brand-new team in Hyderabad. His coworkers nominated him Engineer of the Year.
On weekends, Srinu embraced American pastimes: camping, flip-cup, and volleyball. He moved in with another Rockwell employee, Alok, an avid cricket player from Hyderabad who had recently graduated from the University of Missouri–Kansas City. Srinu towered nearly a foot over his friend, and the pair’s contrasting personalities—Alok, outgoing and charismatic; Srinu, perceptive and contemplative—gave their relationship an Odd Couple feel. (One mutual friend likened Alok to “head-banging Metallica” and Srinivas to “a quiet flute.”) One time last year, Alok excitedly jumped on the hood of Srinu’s brand-new red Mazda, fresh from the dealership, and dented it. Srinu just shook his head, smiling at his friend’s guilty apologies. “We can fix it.”
In the fall of 2012, Srinu and Nani finally wed in Hyderabad, surrounded by 1,000 family members and friends. They moved into an apartment in Iowa, directly across from his Rockwell office. Srinu had petitioned for permanent residency, but they knew the process could drag on for years. Nani accepted an H-4 visa, given to spouses of H-1B holders, which prohibited her from working. Each afternoon she would deliver Srinu home-cooked curries for lunch, then return home and wait for him to leave the office. “I felt stuck,” she says. She often checked a Facebook page titled “H4 Visa, a Curse,” topped by a logo depicting a woman in a gilded cage. Sympathetic, Srinu talked about moving to a bigger city with more opportunities for her. “Your father sent you here with a big heart,” he told his wife, “he wanted you to be something.”
Weekends were Nani’s escape. She hosted parties for their surrogate family, a group of fellow Indian twentysomethings who worked at Rockwell. She and Srinu found Midwesterners welcoming. They celebrated Thanksgiving and went out for ice cream with a non-Indian couple. Srinu brushed off the gruff octogenarian in their apartment building who grilled him in the elevator about where he was from. “He’s an old grandpa,” he’d tell Nani. “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Slowly, the couple’s Cedar Rapids friends moved away to bigger cities. In 2013, with their tight-knit group dispersing and Nani languishing at home, Srinu sent his résumé to Garmin, Rockwell’s competitor for avionics contracts. The hiring managers bit immediately, inviting him to interview for a senior aviation systems engineer position based in Olathe (pronounced oh-LAY-thuh), Kansas, a suburb 20 miles outside Kansas City. That November, Nani found herself driving around with a realtor, imagining her future in the endless subdivisions of Johnson County.
Srinu’s application for permanent residency had been in limbo for three years. (Even today, the government is processing applications for Indians who petitioned before 2008.) Still, after making the move to Kansas, the couple felt comfortable enough to take a gamble, and they bought a foundation on a lot in a brand-new subdivision abutting pastureland that was minutes from Garmin’s offices. Then they painstakingly worked out the details for their $300,000 dream home. Srinu stayed up late clicking around the Sherwin-Williams website, trying out digital paint hues on a rendering of their future facade. He finally settled on a dusty dark blue. “That house was his heart,” Nani says. They selected a plan with four bedrooms upstairs, which they hoped to fill with Kansas-born kids. In September 2014 they moved in and added homey finishing touches: a wooden Hindu altar that Srinu built himself; souvenir magnets on the fridge from their trips to Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; a grill on the back patio. A neighbor left a batch of home-brewed beer on their porch, a welcoming gift for the first Indian couple on the block.
Eight months later, the Obama administration moved to allow certain H-4 visa holders to work. After steadfast encouragement from Srinu on her long search, Nani accepted a job as a database developer at a marketing company in nearby Overland Park. Now she packed two lunches each night, hustling out of bed before her husband in the morning as he playfully pleaded with her to stay. He picked up the slack around the house, transcribing Nani’s laundry instructions onto a piece of paper that he taped above the washer. When his wife pulled out her credit card to pay a restaurant bill, Srinu would flirt proudly, “Hmm … impressive.”
Despite her new independence, Nani began to worry about their safety. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment, and at dinner parties the couple and their friends discussed a steady stream of indignities against minorities. In an incident in Kentucky, a woman ranted, “Go back to wherever the fuck you come from, lady,” at a Hispanic customer in a shopping mall. Last December, someone in suburban Maryland reported that an Indian American woman (who was just taking a walk) was “suspicious”; the cops who responded asked the woman if she was legal. Nani wondered whether she could still go out in public alone, or “do I always need to be in a group?”
While few in Nani and Srinu’s circle could vote, a survey last year found that 70 percent of voters of Indian heritage were in favor of Clinton. “Indians kind of despise Trump,” says Sanjoy Chakravorty, a Temple University professor and coauthor of The Other One Percent: Indians in America. “But many of them live in these very suburban communities where the sentiment runs the other way. They keep a low profile and don’t discuss with neighbors how they feel.”
Srinu followed the news closely, tuning in to both CNN and Fox to analyze their wildly different takes. Though he watched Trump rail against immigrants, he was undeterred in his vision of the United States. “As long as we mind our own business and are good to each other, nothing will happen to us,” he told Nani. On the phone, she overheard him telling his anxious father that Johnson County was a safe place. Indeed, between 2012 and 2016, Olathe averaged just one homicide a year. The worst affront to the local Indian community was a rash of home burglaries targeting gold and jewelry. Nani wanted to believe Srinu’s optimism.
On an unseasonably warm Wednesday night last February, the temperatures reaching the high 70s, Nani arrived home from work around 5:30 pm. She texted her husband to come have a chai, a postwork ritual of theirs.
Where tea? Srinu texted back.
Where do you think? she typed, sassily. They’d sit together on the back porch watching the sunset, looking out on the nearby school where they hoped to one day send their kids. Srinu didn’t reply. When she called, it went straight to voicemail.
In Olathe’s low-slung, tree-lined neighborhoods, the Garmin campus stands out. The company’s eight-story office complex rises from the plains like a mast. Founded in the late ’80s by two engineers from Kansas and Taiwan who combined their names (Gary and Min), the GPS maker now has offices all around the world. It’s Olathe’s largest private employer. When the company applied for rights to build a new warehouse and manufacturing center in 2015, the city council signed off, ignoring complaints from NIMBYs worried about their backyard views.
Johnson County’s history is one of westward-bound pioneers settling on the rolling plains in the early 1800s. “Indians” weren’t newcomers then, but the word the settlers used for the native people was adopted for the local high school’s mascot. Now the land where the Oregon Trail branched is colonized by Target and Bass Pro Shops. The county is 87 percent white and has a median household income of $76,000, the highest in the state. Here, Kansas’ red political leanings fade to pink—48 percent of the county voted for Trump in 2016, a considerable decline for the Republican candidate from prior elections. Johnson County voters “like the Bob Doles and Mitt Romneys,” says Patrick Miller, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas. “They don’t have as great a love for where the Republican party is going.”
Since the mid-’90s, the prosperity of the surrounding Kansas City metro area has been tied to the tech industry. Companies like Sprint, Garmin, tech-outsourcing company DST Systems, and health care IT firm Cerner were founded by locals that stayed, sometimes benefiting from hefty tax breaks. Other tech titans like IBM and Oracle have opened satellite operations in the area. In Kansas, the tech industry’s gripe about the shortage of qualified talent is becoming a full-throated dirge. Four math or computer-related jobs remain open for every unemployed worker in the area, according to the Mid-America Regional Council, but recruiting from outside the Midwest is difficult. “People think we have cows running up and down the street,” sighs Pam Whiting, a spokesperson for the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce. “If you hear resentment in my voice, it’s absolutely true. There’s a bias against the Midwest, particularly from people who’ve never been here.”
That deficit has been relieved somewhat by H-1B recruits, many of whom graduate from nearby universities. The Indian community in the Kansas City area has grown to 25,000 in the past decade. Indian immigrants mingle at local Telugu- and Hindi-speaking associations like the Hindu Temple & Cultural Center of Kansas City, where Srinu and Nani often went to pray. Shortly after moving to Kansas, Nani started taking lessons in classical Indian singing, and Srinu joined a cricket team, the Khiladis.
Srinu’s old friend Alok followed him from Iowa to Kansas, and to Garmin. They and Manju Nag, another recent Garmin avionics recruit, became an inseparable trio, often working in one another’s offices. At 5 pm, one of them would inevitably message the others, “Want to head to Austins?” They’d drive five minutes down the road to the mom-and-pop sports bar. They’d stay talking for hours, opting for English, since Manju didn’t speak his friends’ regional Telugu.
That Wednesday night in February, when Srinu asked Alok to go to Austins, Manju was away on a work trip. Alok was writing emails but agreed—it was rare that Srinu offered to go out for a drink lately, and they’d been through a couple months of punishing project deadlines. When they settled into their usual spot on the patio, the University of Kansas men’s basketball team was duking it out for the Big 12 championship on TV, and the place was packed. They ordered two beers.
That’s when the man in an odd, pseudo-military getup emerged onto the patio for a smoke. He noticed the two Indian men and scowled at them, his face birdlike and cleaved with wrinkles. Then he approached their table.
“Where are you from?” he demanded loudly. The same question Srinu had fielded in the elevator of his Iowa apartment building years before. “Why are you here in this country?!”
Alok went to find a manager. Srinu stayed seated and responded quietly. “We are here legally. We are on H1-B. We are from India.” The guy called them “sand niggers,” according to one eyewitness, and added, “We pay for your visas to be here. You need to get out of here! You don’t belong here!”
The commotion drew other patrons’ attention away from the blaring TVs. Ian Grillot and a friend, who’d overheard the exchange, hustled the man off the patio and into the bar. Inside, the manager told him not to bother paying. Just get out.
He scoffed at his corrallers, indignant. “You’re going to stick up for them?” Bystanders watched him stagger around the parking lot before leaving.
Those at surrounding tables called out words of solidarity to Alok and Srinu. “What a douchebag!” “We’re all Americans.” The bartender came out to apologize. Jeremy Luby, a software developer who caught the tail end of the outburst, picked up their tab. Spotting Luby’s work badge—“You must be a tech guy too”—Srinu invited him to join them on the patio. After chatting a few minutes, Luby left to take a bathroom break. That’s when another Austins regular spotted the man in white heading toward the bar, gun in hand. He tried to warn the others—“He has a gun!”—but it happened quickly. The shooter rushed through the patio door and opened fire.
A mile from Austins, home contractor Andy Berthelsen was pulling out of his driveway when he saw a truck hurtle over the curb at the mouth of their cul-de-sac. Screeching up to the house across the street, the truck nearly smashed into the garage door as it opened. The pickup belonged to Berthelsen’s neighbor of 13 years, Adam Purinton.
This erratic behavior was out of character even by Purinton’s standards. “He never drove reckless,” Berthelsen says. For years, when Purinton was drunk—and he was often drunk—he would ask Berthelsen to drive him to King’s Liquor. Having gotten two DUIs in the ’90s, Purinton didn’t want another. When he did drive, it was slooooow.
When he heard news of a shooting at Austins later that night, Berthelsen recalled his neighbor’s bizarre driving. He turned to his wife: “Watch, it was Adam.” He meant it as a joke.
Adam Purinton grew up in a suburb of Johnson County, attending Shawnee Mission North High School. In the early 1980s, the school’s “Indian” sporting teams and mascot were the most diverse thing about it; the student body was virtually all white, awash in Izod polos and boat shoes. Purinton appeared in his 1983 senior yearbook, a bright-eyed, smiling kid in a sport coat. After high school, he enlisted in the Navy. In the ’90s he worked in the Wichita airport’s air traffic control tower, where the local newspaper shot a photo of him—a mustachioed, brawny man peering out onto the tarmac with binoculars. He later worked at the FAA in Olathe. But he had an ongoing problem with booze: He was pulled over for a DUI in Wichita in 1994, and he’d later tell Berthelsen that he lost his FAA job after failing to self-report a second DUI. He landed a position as an IT technician at Time Warner Cable in Kansas City in the mid-’00s, troubleshooting employees’ computer problems. One day, a former coworker says, he just disappeared from the job.
To Berthelsen, Purinton was the cul-de-sac’s oafish buffoon, annoying but ultimately harmless. In a cookie-cutter neighborhood of inconspicuous two-story homes, Purinton had his house painted a curdled custard hue with a garish, pumpkin-orange trim. He’d often stagger around the street drunk. One time, while mowing the lawn, he simply fell over. In 2009, police broke down Purinton’s door with a ram to seize the marijuana growing in his basement. Purinton once referred to a black man who lived down the block as “the dark meat” in front of one of Berthelsen’s kids—the one time he says he heard of Purinton mentioning race. Berthelsen also recalls Purinton setting out lawn chairs and sandwiches for Hispanic roofers working on his house. “Does that sound like someone who’s a real big racist to you?” he asks.
In the past few years, Purinton had fallen into a series of odd jobs. He manned a register at Westlake Ace Hardware, cleaned dishes at Minsky’s pizza, and worked at a liquor store near Austins, according to neighbors. Purinton would also show up on the porch of another cul-de-sac couple, Mike and Carol Shimeall, retired educators who blazed by the neighborhood’s Trump campaign signs with a “Proud Democrat” sticker affixed to their bumper.
Carol says she always found Purinton “a little bit creepy.” Still, she tried not to ostracize him, passing him to her husband, a Vietnam vet, when he came ringing. Mike accepted invitations into Purinton’s house, which smelled of cigarette smoke but was otherwise tidy and decked out in Navy photos and medals. Purinton once asked Mike why they kept a flag raised at half-staff in their front yard. For the elementary kids killed at Sandy Hook, Mike replied. In return for their friendship, Purinton would show up with a jar of homemade dill pickles or a whetstone to sharpen their knives. “He didn’t seem dangerous,” Carol says. “To me, he was more pathetic.”
Even amid his usual boozing, neighbors noted that Purinton took a downward spiral after his father died of cancer in 2015. From what they could tell, Purinton’s dad, a retired Sprint database developer, had been his best friend. (The elder Purinton’s LinkedIn page still reads, “I am retired and livin’ the dream, traveling and trout fishing. I did what I had to, so I can now do what I want to.”) Shortly after his father passed away, Purinton rang the Shimealls’ bell bawling, wanting to talk about his dad’s death. The episode struck Carol as melodramatic. “It was like no one else had ever lost a parent,” she says. As his drinking increased, Purinton’s wrinkles deepened, making him look decades older than his 51 years.
A month before the shooting, Purinton once again came to the Shimealls’ door despondent. Tearfully, he told them he was going to sell his house. “He said, ‘Well, I’m just going to disappear,’” Carol recalls. “It almost sounded vindictive, the way he said it.” The couple worried about him committing suicide.
He certainly had the means. Purinton inherited a collection of pistols from his father and asked Berthelsen, a self-described “gun guy,” to show him how to unload them. (“I just thought, ‘You want to show them off,’” Berthelsen says.) While the rifles Purinton owned were common in suburban Kansas, both Berthelsen and Mike Shimeall wondered about a pistol he’d hung beside the front door by its trigger hole. To Berthelsen, keeping a gun there seemed idiotic: dangerously easy for an intruder to grab. Last year, late on a Sunday night, Berthelsen called Purinton to complain about the gunshots he heard coming from the direction of his house. “I said, ‘Quit shooting fucking guns off.’ Then he went inside and shot them in his basement.”
Kansas has some of the most lax gun policies in the country. (“It’s like the Wild West,” Mike Shimeall says.) No permit, registration, or license is necessary to own a gun or carry loaded weapons in public. As of July 1, public hospitals and universities are generally required to allow concealed weapons. As Purinton zoomed toward Austins on that Wednesday night, he could have a loaded handgun in his car without a permit. It would have been illegal only if he was carrying it while drunk.
That night, the Shimealls’ phones buzzed with texts from the city of Olathe warning them to stay in their home. An armored police truck rolled into Purinton’s driveway and sent a robot into the garage. “Adam, call this number,” an officer repeated on a loudspeaker, reading out digits. But Purinton was heading for the state line and, after an hour and 20 minutes, pulled into a motel in Clinton, Missouri, population 9,000. When he walked into the lobby, the 30-year-old woman he found working the front desk was Indian.
The woman’s husband had encountered his share of racism while running small motels around the rural Midwest. Sometimes white customers would enter, see him or his wife working the desk, and leave. But Purinton didn’t say anything menacing to the woman at the desk. Minutes after checking into a room, he took off, heading to an Applebee’s down the road. There he asked a female bartender if he could hide out with her and her husband, confiding that he had just “shot and killed two Iranian people” in Olathe.
The bartender called the police, warning them to come in silently, no sirens. Minutes later, two officers stormed the restaurant, hauling Purinton away.
In her blue house, five minutes from Purinton’s home, Nani called her husband again. Voicemail. She sent him an email with the subject line “Are you at work?” which he’d get if he was at his desk. No response. Annoyed, she figured he’d gone out for drinks without telling her, as he had several times in the past. Srinu had acknowledged the issue in a Valentine’s card a week earlier; despite his occasional thoughtlessness, he wrote, “I can’t imagine coming home and not seeing you … Yours lovingly, Srinu.”
As she began eating dinner, she scrolled through her Facebook feed. Then she saw the news: Three unnamed people shot at Austins, Srinu’s favorite happy hour spot. Two were in critical condition. She called Alok’s wife, Reepthi, who was five months pregnant. Alok had called his wife and told a fib designed to keep her calm. He had gone to the hospital to visit a cricket friend who was injured, he said, and might not be back until after midnight. Reepthi thought Srinu was with him, but Nani was unconvinced. She continued making calls and checking the driveway for Srinu’s Nissan Altima. An Olathe police car rolled up to her house instead.
Two officers came to the door and asked her to sit down. Suddenly shivering, she sank onto the bottom steps of the stairway in the foyer.
Srinivas had been killed, they said.
“Are you sure?” Nani yelped. “Did you see the man you are talking about?! Can you show me a picture to identify? Is the man that you are talking about six foot two?!”
Yes.
Nani let out a howling scream.
Neighbors drove her to the hospital, but a clergyman in the lobby told her he had been there when Srinu died and that his body was being readied for autopsy. Still in disbelief, she held up a picture of him on her phone: Was this the man? The clergyman nodded. With nothing left to do, Nani’s neighbors drove her to Manju’s house. She stayed up all night, pacing aimlessly. In those early hours, friends and family were already driving and boarding flights from Iowa, New Jersey, California, and Colorado. In the coming days, national reporters started arriving, snapping photos of bouquets placed in front of Austins. In the news in India, Alok’s father entreated other parents to stop sending their children to the US.
Thursday afternoon, exhausted, Nani walked into the room at Manju’s house where her friends were gathered.
“I want to talk to the press.”
The management at Garmin arranged a vigil and press conference for Friday morning, less than 48 hours after the murder. Dressed in an Indian salwar kameez, a bleary-eyed Nani walked into Garmin’s packed amphitheater and stood at the podium in front of hundreds of employees. She calmly began talking, without notes, and would continue for an hour. She told the group about how she and Srinu had first met in front of that temple in Hyderabad, and mimed craning her neck to see his face for the first time, drawing laughs. She joked that her husband made sure to take all 15 of his vacation days before leaving Rockwell Collins, because, he had told her, “I know Garmin doesn’t have it like that.” She told them how she nagged him about his happy hours, which seemed to drag on forever. As she spoke, she seemed to realize again and again that the plans they made together had now collapsed. She concluded abruptly, saying, “I just want to sing a song for him.” She then began a Hindi serenade out of a 1970s Bollywood film, her wavering voice changing its upbeat pulse into a lilting elegy. The melody echoed through the auditorium before her tears cut the verse short.
Then Nani walked into another room to meet the throng of waiting press. Breathing heavily, her eyes wide, she spoke slowly but forcefully. “I was always concerned. Were we doing the right thing by staying in the United States of America? ... What will the government do to stop this hate crime? My husband would want justice to be done. We need an answer.”
The next day, Nani flew home to Hyderabad with Srinu’s body in Air India stowage. As she emerged from the airport into the balmy air, a wall of photographers snapped paparazzi-style photos of her. Srinu’s family pulled her hoodie over her head and guided her through the pack of press camped outside their house. India’s biggest newspapers and networks covered every new development. During the Hindu ritual at Srinu’s family’s home, television networks filmed her caressing her husband for the last time, weeping. Nani didn’t attend Srinu’s cremation—“I wanted to have a certain picture of him in my mind,” she says—but the service was telecast on Indian news and uploaded to YouTube. Mourners reportedly chanted “Trump, down, down! … Down with racism! Down with hatred!” Back in the US, Congress observed a moment of silence for Kuchibhotla.
In the weeks following the shooting, a Sikh man near Seattle was shot in his driveway by a white man who allegedly yelled, “Go back to your own country!” (The Sikh man survived.) A 43-year-old Indian convenience store owner in South Carolina was gunned down in his front yard. In Florida, a white man rolled a dumpster in front of an Indian-owned store’s door and lit it on fire, telling sheriff’s deputies that he wanted to “run the Arabs out of our country.” An Indian high school junior in Palo Alto wrote that he was told, three times in one week, to “go back to your country.” BuzzFeed reported that a computer programmer from Virginia posted on his website, SaveAmericanITJobs.org, about the “Indian IT mafia” taking jobs. The site included a home video of Indians playing volleyball in a suburban Ohio park as the cameraman says: “The number of people from foreign countries blows my mind out here.” (After news reports, the website was taken down.) Each event reverberated through the Indian community in the US and at home. “In the country ‘of the people, by the people, for the people,’ newcomers are being welcomed with bullets,” an Aaj Tak newscast warned in Hindi.
“This ‘Go back to your country,’ ‘Go back to where you came from,’ that’s all Trump,” says Trilok Mahadevia, an H-1B product manager in Houston. “Now my parents are worried sick.” Berthelsen says he weighed in on an online forum, claiming his neighbor was simply a drunk. “The bottle took him,” he says. Other people frame the shooting as a random act of violence. “Somebody lost his mind,” says software tester Anjana Singh, the spokesperson of the India Association of Kansas City. “I don’t think a president’s rule will manipulate someone to start targeting one kind of people. Americans are not like that.” The Sunday after the shooting, Singh’s association hosted a peace march in Olathe, where nearly 2,000 people—the majority of them Indians—walked in a circle around a conference center and chanted, “Unity is part of community.” Six days after the murder, amid mounting pressure for a statement (“At some point, embarrassingly late begins to verge on something more disquieting,” wrote the Kansas City Star’s editorial board) Trump name-checked Kansas City in his address to Congress, denouncing “hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.”
This April, the same month Trump introduced his “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, the number of applications submitted for H-1B visas fell for the first time in six years. “Since I was a kid, the United States is a mecca for Indians. It’s the ultimate achievement,” Mahadevia says. “The whole aura of America as a destination is no longer.”
In late April, Nani drove back into Olathe.
She had stayed in India for six weeks, waiting for the US consulate to straighten out her visa to return. Now she pulled up to her and Srinu’s home and took a deep, shaky breath as she surveyed the familiar blue exterior. As she walked through the house, images swirled through her memory—Srinu signing the closing contract, choosing those three empty bedrooms. She went into their shared closet and gazed at his dress shirts, still hanging neatly. In the house, she says, “for me, he’s still alive.” She can see him standing in front of the sink, precisely combing the front half of his hair, neglecting the back as he always did. She imagines him mowing the lawn in his shorts and bursting through the garage door after work.
Despite the shock and depth of her pain, Nani knew—even in the days after the murder—she would return to Kansas. “I have to fulfill his dream of me being successful, of me standing on my own,” she said then. She imagines her husband is still pushing her. Srinu once had to coax her out of his car to introduce herself at a company she had applied to (“What if they think I’m stupid?” she had asked him). Yet without him, she had spoken in front of hundreds of people, then marched down the hall to address a phalanx of reporters. The woman who had never made a bank transaction before leaving India now has nearly $700,000 in GoFundMe donations from all over the world. “To be frank, I’m quite surprised at myself,” she says. The gunman had wanted to extinguish two brown-skinned men, but Nani’s American sphere of influence is growing.
Purinton has been charged with first-degree murder, two counts of attempted first-degree murder, and hate crimes. A federal grand jury alleged that he targeted Srinivas and Alok because of their “race, color, religion, and national origin.” If convicted, Purinton could face life in prison or death. Nani told authorities she doesn’t wish to pursue the death penalty but will respect the government’s decision. This spring, Purinton penned a letter to his neighbor from county jail. “I really fucked up this time and am just going to have to take responsibility for what I did,” he wrote, according to Berthelsen. When he appeared at his first court date on February 27, he wore a padded smock designed to prevent suicide.
When Nani flew back to India with Srinu’s body, just days after the murder, she had an overnight layover in New Jersey. Waiting out the sleepless hours, she opened a notebook and started to write. On February 28, her words were posted to Facebook, and the message was relayed across international news.
We were planning to expand our own family and had had a doctor’s appointment just a few weeks ago.
I am writing this as it sinks in that this dream of ours is now shattered. I really wish we had a child of our own, in whom I could see Srinivas and make him like Srinu.
He always assured me that if we think good, be good, then good will happen to us and that we will be safe. He used to hug me tightly to sleep, giving me this assurance. Srinu, now that I have gotten used to that warm hug, I might not be able to sleep.
She closed with a question, in all caps: “DO WE BELONG HERE?” The Kansans sitting on the patio at Austins that night, the ones who ran to Alok and Srinu’s side, had one answer. The man with the gun had another.
Lauren Smiley (@laurensmiley) writes about tech culture and criminal justice. This is her first feature for WIRED.
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