Before and after hate hits the headlines

There are moments that make headlines.

And then there are the moments before and after — the ones we tend to miss.

In Buffalo, the violence didn’t build quietly. It arrived all at once, on a Saturday afternoon at Top 5 Friendly Markets. A neighborhood grocery store is the kind of place where routine lives, where neighbors pass in the aisles, where small conversations just happen.

On May 14, 2022, a gunman targeted that routine. He drove 200 miles to a predominantly Black neighborhood and opened fire. Ten people never made it home.

In the days that followed, the names became familiar. The stories followed. But for those who lived there, the loss was never abstract. It was immediate. Personal. Rooted in place.

That’s where Arjun Sethi begins.

Not with the shooter. Not with the spectacle. But with the people left behind.

In his book “American Hate,” and now in a documentary of the same name with director Harry Gantz, Sethi resists the instinct to explain violence through the lens of the perpetrator. Instead, he builds something else: a collection of lives, told by those still carrying them.

“According to the FBI, 11,862 hate crimes took place in America in 2023. Community groups say the real number is much higher.”

That statement opens the film. But the numbers are only a starting point.

“I actually picked up the book “American Hate,” which Arjun is the writer of, in the Santa Fe Library about five years ago, and read it and thought, not only would this make a really powerful, important film to address this issue of, you know, the victims and the long-term effects on victims and survivors of hate crimes,” Gantz said. “But that Arjun worked in a very similar style to how I make documentary films. Although they're done in interviews, his voice isn't a part of it. He just does it in first person with the voice of the subjects telling their stories.”

That approach shifts the focus. These are not stories about why hate happens. They are stories about what it leaves behind.

In Buffalo, that story lives in a phone call.

“Mom… I got shot.”

Zeneta Everhart’s son, Zaire Goodman, survived. One of three who did. The bullet missed what it could have taken. She would later call it a miracle.

But survival doesn’t end a story. It changes it.

In the weeks that followed, Everhart stepped into a role no parent chooses. She spoke publicly. She testified. She turned grief into something outward facing.

Not just mourning, but movement.

Elsewhere, the warning signs looked different, but they were still there.

In Tulsa, it started with words. Slurs. Threats. The kind of language that feels like it should set off alarms. The kind that, if taken seriously, might stop something worse from happening.

For Khalid Jabara and his family, those warnings were not subtle. They were repeated. Documented. Reported.

What Sethi makes clear is that nothing about what happened next was sudden.

It was building.

Until one day in 2016, it ended in a driveway.

Khalid Jabara was shot and killed by a neighbor whose hatred had already been seen, heard and reported.

“Khalid Jabara was an Arab American, came from a Lebanese family who migrated during the Civil War, and made their home in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” Sethi said. “A white supremacist moves next door who terrorized the family. He would call them things like, ‘dirty Muslims,’ and what not. He actually ran over the mom, Haifa Jabara, and he was put in jail and denied bond.

“Through some unfortunate sequence there's a renewed motion for bond and then he's granted bond and he's allowed to return home next door to the family he was targeting for a year, to the family whose mother he already ran over. Fast forward several weeks, he kills Khalid Jabara on his front doorstep.”

Even with that history, the crime was not officially reported as a hate crime.

The failure wasn’t just the act itself. It was everything that came before it — the moments where something could have been done.

In Montana, the story looks different.

There are no recorded threats. No escalating pattern.

Just a road at night.

Mika Westwolf, a 22-year-old Indigenous woman, was walking along Highway 93 near the Flathead Reservation in 2023 when she was struck and killed by a driver who did not stop.

What followed, in Sethi’s telling, is not just about grief — it is about uncertainty.

For her family, Carissa Heavy Runner and Kevin Howard, the fight became about visibility as much as justice. About making sure Mika was seen, even in death. That her story would not disappear into silence.

Because sometimes, the warning signs are not loud. Sometimes, what’s missed is the story itself.

Across these cases — Buffalo, Tulsa, Montana — the details are different. The circumstances shift. But the pattern remains.

A warning reported but not stopped.
A community shattered in an instant.
A mother carrying survival into advocacy.
A life lost with questions that linger.

In each case, the question is not only what happened. It’s when it could have been different.

Before the driveway.
Before the grocery store.
Before the road at night.
Before the rhetoric hardens into belief.

What Sethi’s work suggests is that hate is rarely invisible. It leaves traces. It gives signals. It creates moments — small ones — where something can still be interrupted.

“The goal of the film, just like the book, is to center survivors, their families, and their communities,” Gantz said. “We've seen too often the media sort of swoop in, parachute in, and leave and survivors left to languish with their injuries, with their suffering, and these enduring wounds.

“And then there's all these documentaries analyzing the motives in the childhood of perpetrators of crimes. We’re trying to flip the narrative and give the voice to the victims and make this centered around the survivors and that hopefully will encourage other people who've experienced this because it's through personal stories that things change. And we can have a real national conversation about hate in America, which unfortunately continues.”

Sometimes, those moments are recognized. But often, they aren’t.

And by the time the headlines come, the story has already been written.

"American Hate" will be screened Friday, April 10, at 7 p.m. at the Fountain Theatre as part of the Las Cruces International Film Festival. It will be followed by a Q&A during which Gantz, Sethi, and some of the principals involved in the film will address hate crimes in an open dialogue.