Douglas Miguel Rodriguez had worked in a Jewish supermarket in Jersey City for a year. The immigrant from Ecuador had just started his shift on Tuesday when a man and a woman rushed into the shop and shot themselves.
Rodriguez helped a wounded customer out the back door. He couldn't do it himself.
The 49-year-old was one of three victims of the "JC Kosher Supermarket" attack. Two were Jews. The perpetrators who had previously shot a policeman elsewhere were also killed in a firefight with the police, and three other people were injured. It was the bloodiest day in the recent history of this city on the Hudson River, just across the street from Manhattan.
But what looked like a robbery à la Bonnie and Clyde has since turned out to be something ominous.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / AP
Firefight for hours: Special commands in Jersey City
"It was an act of terrorism," New York Mayor Bill de Blasio recognized as one of the first to do so after the chaos subsided. "A premeditated, anti-Semitic hate crime." The FBI, too, has now classified the crime as "domestic terrorism" - a targeted attack fueled by "anti-Semitism and antipathy against the police" - based on the latest findings on the shooters.
The attack in Jersey City would not be an isolated case. As in Europe, Jewish organizations in the United States are seeing a sharp increase in extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic violence. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), at least 50 people were murdered by right-wing extremists in 2018, the highest number since 1995. In October 2018 alone, eleven died in a terrorist attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
The headline-grabbing blood acts are the tip of an iceberg: In total, there were almost 1900 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States last year - assault, harassment, abuse, vandalism at schools, synagogues and cemeteries.
"Jews in America feel more at risk than they have in decades," warned the ADL of the Jersey City attack. However, after a few days he was largely gone again from the news, supplanted by the roar of the foreseeable impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.
Seth Wenig / AP
The trail starts in the neighboring town: police officers in Jersey City
This should also be due to the fact that the process, motive and background of the crime are still not sufficiently clarified. The investigation now also includes a murder from the weekend before: Michael Rumberger, a taxi driver, had been discovered in the trunk of a car in the neighboring town of Bayonne and had been killed.
When searching for Rumberger's killers, policeman Joe Seals, 40, came across a delivery van that was parked in a Jersey City cemetery on Tuesday, officials said. When Seals approached the vehicle, he was shot immediately. The two inmates then fled with the car.
According to surveillance videos, they parked less than two kilometers away at the Jewish supermarket, got out with guns in hand and entered the store. Troops of the police and the FBI as well as a bomb unit surrounded the area. There was a long gun battle echoing through the streets.
In addition to Rodriguez, two other people died in the supermarket, both were Jews: Leah Mindel Ferencz, 33, who owned the store with her husband, and Moshe Deutsch, 24, a student who happened to be shopping. Deutschs father Abraham Deutsch is a prominent member of the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn.
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Not an isolated case: funeral service after the assassination attempt on a synagogue in Pittsburgh in August 2018
The Jersey City community is their offshoot: A few years ago, dozens of Brooklyn Jewish families, which became increasingly expensive due to gentrification, moved to cheaper Jersey City. They founded a new enclave in the Greenville district, where black people usually live. Conflicts such as those that previously existed in Brooklyn, especially with neighboring African Americans, remained until recently.
The police identified the shooters as David Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50. They had four weapons with them, including a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle. A sharp pipe bomb and a tight, confused "manifest" were found in her van.
In other ways, too, the evidence of a targeted hate crime has increased. Anderson, an army veteran convicted of illegal possession of weapons, is said to have posted anti-Semitic and anti-police slogans online, according to judicial sources. He was also described as a sympathizer for the Black Hebrew Israelites, but his connection to this network of fragmented sects remained unclear at first.
The Black Hebrew Israelites, who have nothing to do with Judaism, consider blacks and other non-whites to be the only "chosen" people of Israel. The civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center describes them as an anti-Semitic hate organization, although they have been less known by violence than by loud sermons on the sidewalks of big cities.
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New wave of hate: mourning Jews (2018 after the Pittsburgh attack)
Many Jews are increasingly living in fear. This is also evident from the fact that the New York Police Department (NYPD) is the first US police agency to set up a special task force against extreme right-wing terror and neo-Nazi violence. The unit has been active since early December. Nationwide, the FBI had underestimated such dangers in decades of fighting Islamist terror, much as violence against other minorities has often been overlooked.
At the same time, thanks to his rhetoric, President Trump is now being blamed for the new wave of hate by some. Especially since Trump's supporters like to spread a conspiracy theory popular with the right, according to which the large Jewish investor George Soros is behind many evils in the USA.
Trump himself likes to emphasize his closeness to Jews. His daughter Ivanka converted when she married Jared Kushner, the grandson of Holocaust survivors. On Wednesday, Trump signed an - already planned - decree "to combat anti-Semitism", which has nothing to do with the Jersey City attack or other violence, but concerns criticism and discrimination against Jewish students.
At the same time, Trump - whose election was hailed by US neo-Nazis as a "victory of the will" - apparently also embraces the other side. He surrounds himself with right-wing demagogues like his top advisor Stephen Miller when he expects political benefits from it. And when hundreds of right-wing extremists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, and anti-Semitic slogans roared in 2017, he initially refused to criticize them.