Abdul El-Sayed Promoted an Infamous Hijab Hate-Crime Hoax — Despite Police Warnings.
Four days after a mother of five was found beaten to death in her El Cajon, California home in 2012, a note left at the scene — “Go back to your country, you terrorist” — had already made her a national symbol of anti-Muslim violence. Rallies formed. Magazine essays followed.
El Cajon police had already told the public, on the record, that no such conclusion was warranted. Abdul El-Sayed (D), then a public-health researcher and now the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, published his hate-crime claim two days after that caution anyway — and, according to every account reviewed for this story, has never revisited it since.
Two years later, a jury convicted the victim’s husband of staging the murder to look exactly like the hate crime El-Sayed had described. The sequence — caution, claim, conviction, silence — is what makes this more than an old op-ed.
- Mar. 21, 2012 Shaima Alawadi, 32, is found beaten in her El Cajon home by her teenage daughter; she dies three days later — NBC San Diego, Wikipedia
- Mar. 25–26, 2012 El Cajon Police Chief Jim Redman tells reporters there are 'no conclusions' and the case is not a confirmed hate crime — CBS 8 San Diego
- Mar. 28, 2012 El-Sayed publishes an op-ed calling Alawadi's death a hate-crime murder — two days after police's public caution — Mic, El-Sayed's own byline
- 26 years to life the sentence given husband Kassim Alhimidi in 2014, for staging the killing to look like a hate crime — CBS News
On March 21, 2012, Shaima Alawadi — a 32-year-old Iraqi refugee and mother of five — was found severely beaten in the dining room of her family’s El Cajon home by her teenage daughter, Fatima. She died three days later, on March 24. Beside her, investigators found a handwritten note reading, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.”
The note detonated nationally, arriving weeks after the shooting of Trayvon Martin had already put the country on edge about violence against minorities. The Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, NBC News, and CNN all covered Alawadi’s death as a likely anti-Muslim hate crime. “Hoodies ‘n’ Hijabs” rallies, explicitly pairing her case with Martin’s, spread to campuses nationwide, including a Stanford University rally on April 17, 2012. The frame was simple and, to a grieving public, intuitive: a woman in a hijab, murdered for who she was.
Before that national frame had fully set, the department actually investigating Alawadi’s death was already pumping the brakes. On March 25 and 26, 2012, El Cajon Police Chief Jim Redman told reporters there were “no conclusions” in the case and that detectives were treating it as an “isolated incident” — language deliberately short of confirming the hate-crime narrative that was already spreading well ahead of the evidence.
Abdul El-Sayed did not wait for the department to finish its work. On March 28, 2012 — two days after Chief Redman’s public caution and four days after Alawadi’s death — El-Sayed, then a public-health researcher and social epidemiologist years away from elected office, published an op-ed on the news site Mic (then PolicyMic) titled “From Trayvon Martin Hoodies to Shaima Alawadi Hijabs: Who is Responsible for Hate in America?” His own words left no room for the caution police had just issued.
“Trayvon and Shaima were both murdered in cold blood. Trayvon and Shaima both fit archetypes indicted by American society as foreign, dangerous, and evil.”
Abdul El-Sayed (D) · Mic (PolicyMic), March 28, 2012
Alawadi’s “crime,” El-Sayed wrote, was “having the courage to wear a Hijab in a society where Muslims are openly vilified.” He did not treat the case as a one-off aside. Nearly six months later, on Sept. 11, 2012, he repeated the same framing in a CNN Global Public Square essay, “Health of Muslims, Arab-Americans another victim of 9/11,” again citing Alawadi’s death as evidence of anti-Muslim violence in America.
On Nov. 8, 2012 — seven and a half months after Alawadi’s death — El Cajon police arrested her husband, Kassim Alhimidi, an Iraqi refugee who had once trained U.S. soldiers, and charged him with her murder. Investigators had found the note was a photocopy, not an original, and that Alawadi had been planning to divorce Alhimidi and move their five children to Texas — away from him.
A jury convicted Alhimidi of first-degree murder in April 2014. On June 23, 2014, a judge sentenced him to 26 years to life. He had staged his wife’s killing to look like a hate crime. The case that had launched national rallies and magazine essays was, per the jury’s verdict, a domestic-violence homicide dressed up by the killer himself as a bias attack.
“It disgusts me that you made this look like a hate crime.”
Fatima Alawadi, Shaima's daughter, on her father Kassim Alhimidi's conviction
Alhimidi is not owed a presumption of innocence in these pages — a jury has already tested and resolved that question. What remained untested, twelve years on, was whether the people who had broadcast the opposite conclusion in 2012 would ever say so.
El-Sayed was not alone in getting the story wrong in March 2012 — that was the point of a note staged to be believed. Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR-Michigan — the same state El-Sayed would later seek to represent in the U.S. Senate — said at the time that “Shaima Al-Awadi’s murder, like Trayvon Martin’s, was a senseless murder based upon racial animus.” National outlets ran with the same frame before police had finished their work.
The timing: he published four days after Alawadi’s death and two days after police’s public caution — not in the first hours of confusion, but after officers had already asked the public to hold off.
The platform: a national byline under his own name, repeated again six months later on CNN, not a since-deleted social post.
The silence since: “In the 12 years since that conviction, El-Sayed has never issued a retraction or changed his assertion,” Townhall reported in June 2026 — a finding no other outlet reviewed for this story contradicts.
It is worth stating plainly what El-Sayed was, and was not, in March 2012: a private citizen and researcher, not yet the Wayne County health director, 2018 gubernatorial candidate, or Senate nominee he would become. Nobody is arguing he committed a crime, or even that making the claim was unreasonable given the note police first found. What is fair to weigh is that he has since held or sought public office repeatedly — and, on the record every source reviewed could locate, never revisited a claim a jury has directly contradicted. This is one entry in a documented pattern of past statements now drawing scrutiny as El-Sayed runs a competitive statewide race.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Sept. 14, 2026 story states plainly that El-Sayed’s Senate campaign did not respond to its request for comment on the episode. As of publication, it has not responded to Civic Intelligence either.
El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, running against Republican Mike Rogers (R) in one of the most closely watched Senate races on the 2026 map. None of that makes a thirteen-year-old op-ed disqualifying on its own — plenty of commentators got the Alawadi case wrong in the confused first week. What makes it relevant now is narrower and harder to wave away: a candidate for one of a hundred U.S. Senate seats built part of his early public voice on a false hate-crime claim, was warned by police before he published it, and has apparently never corrected the record even after a jury did that work for him.
Voters can decide for themselves how much weight a 2012 essay should carry against a 2026 Senate ballot. Our job is narrower: make sure they get to weigh it with the actual timeline — the caution, the claim, the conviction, and the silence — rather than with whichever half of it either campaign chooses to repeat.
El Cajon police publicly cautioned on March 25–26, 2012 that Shaima Alawadi’s death was not a confirmed hate crime. Two days later, Abdul El-Sayed (D) — now the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat — published an op-ed declaring she had been “murdered in cold blood” for wearing a hijab. In 2014, a jury convicted her husband, Kassim Alhimidi, of staging the killing to look exactly like the hate crime El-Sayed described. In the twelve years since that conviction, no source reviewed for this story found any record that El-Sayed retracted or revised his claim, and his Senate campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
