The left has made it abundantly clear that they do not want anyone talking or tweeting about Mollie Tibbetts’ death at the hands of an illegal immigrant. In the past 24 hours, CNN has published not one but two different stories suggesting that President Trump should not talk or tweet about Tibbetts. The argument is the same in both pieces: If Trump really cared about the issue he would also have tweeted about the case of Nabra Hassanen:

The Trump administration (and to a lesser extent, some of the media) has been silent about cases involving non-white victims — ranging from missing black girls in Washington DC to the death of Nabra Hassanen, a northern Virginia Muslim teen, allegedly also at the hands of a man who entered the country illegally. The political expediency of using one girl or woman’s death over another says ugly things about where we are in America today.

Here’s the 2nd piece also at CNN:

Eleven months before Mollie Tibbetts disappeared, for instance, a Virginia teenager, Nabra Hassanen, was killed, allegedly by an undocumented immigrant who has been charged with capital murder. In that case, initially labeled an incident of road rage by the police, the man kidnapped and raped Hassanen and then dumped her body in a pond near his house. Hassanen, a Muslim wearing a headscarf, had been walking to her Virginia mosque after having the dawn meal at a nearby McDonalds. Neither Donald Trump nor the White House has ever spoken publicly about Hassanen’s murder.

The uproar over Tibbetts’s tragic death dwarfed the reaction to Hassanen’s, exposing a truth rarely considered: the implicit hierarchy of dead women that anoints some as perfect victims entitled to mourning and others as lesser ones with little or no claim at all to mass grieving.

I don’t think either of these authors really want Trump to talk or tweet about Hassanen’s death. What they really want is to call Trump a racist and to discourage anyone else from talking about who murdered Tibbetts.

Contrary to the author’s claim, Hassanen’s death attracted a tremendous amount of media attention which even resulted in vigils in several cities across the U.S. Much of that initial attention was based on the suspicion that Nabra had been targeted because she was Muslim. From the moment the story was reported, the hate crime angle was a major concern in the media. Here’s the Washington Post from last June:

The death of a Virginia teenager who police say was assaulted and then disappeared after leaving a mosque in the Sterling area isn’t being investigated as a hate crime, authorities said Monday.

On Sunday, police found the girl’s remains and a 22-year-old man has been charged with murder in connection with the case…

Fairfax County police identified the man charged with murder in her death as Darwin Martinez Torres of Sterling. On Monday, they did not release any explanation as to why they weren’t investigating the murder as a hate crime…

Police said Monday they aren’t investigating the death as a hate crime, but the issue was on the minds of many Muslims on Sunday.

Even as the idea that Nabra had been targeted because she was Muslim spread, the police said the incident appeared to be a road rage incident:

Nabra went missing early Sunday morning while she and a group of teenagers made their way back to a mosque after having breakfast at a nearby restaurant. Darwin A. Martinez Torres, 22, has been charged with murder.

The teenagers were walking and riding bicycles back to the All Dulles Area Muslim Society at about 3:40 a.m. Sunday, according to police.

Some of the teens were on the sidewalk, and others were in the road. Torres drove up behind the group, began arguing with a boy on a bike and then drove his car onto the curb, detectives said in a statement. The teens scattered, but, police said, the suspect caught up with them in a nearby parking lot, got out of his car and allegedly chased after them with a baseball bat.

Torres caught Nabra and struck her with the bat, according to the statement. Detectives said he then drove her to another location and assaulted her again.

So the initial story was a bit confused. Some said it was a hate crime. Police said road rage. But gradually, more details were revealed about what happened after Nabra was kidnapped by illegal alien Darwin Martinez Torres. This USA Today story from last October notes how the focus of the case suddenly changed:

Nabra Hassanen, the 17-year-old Muslim girl who was killed as she walked to her northern Virginia mosque, was raped as well, an indictment released Monday said.

The indictment accuses Darwin Martinez-Torres, 22, of both raping and sexually assaulting Hassanen with some kind of object. The Commonwealth Attorney couldn’t say what the object was…

Prior to Monday’s indictment, much of the discussion surrounding the case revolved around whether prosecutors should bring hate-crime charges — as sought by some activists — or whether it was a case of road rage, as police have long maintained.

Monday’s indictment, though, brought into focus another aspect of the case: While police had said previously they were investigating whether Hassanen had been sexually assaulted, the indictment is the first court document to spell out any kind of sex-crime charges against Martinez-Torres.

So it took almost five months to clarify what had happened here: An illegal immigrant started an argument with a group of teens, chased them down, hit one with a bat, abducted her, raped her, murdered her and left her body in a pond. Yesterday there was another update on the case from the Washington Post. The suspect was allegedly a member of MS-13:

Prosecutors plan to introduce evidence during a capital murder trial that the man accused of the high-profile killing of a Muslim teen in Virginia last year had been suspected of being a member of the violent MS-13 street gang, according to recent court filings.

Darwin Martinez Torres’s brother-in-law “believed” the 23-year-old was an MS-13 associate as a juvenile in the years before authorities said he abducted, sexually assaulted and brutally killed 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen, according to the filings…

It is not the first time Torres has been accused of an association with the region’s largest and most violent gang, which has experienced a resurgence up and down the East Coast in recent years.

The week before Hassanen was killed, a woman went to an emergency room at a Loudoun County hospital and reported that Torres had punched, choked and sexually assaulted her and was a member of MS-13, according to two people familiar with her account.

Authorities were informed, but the woman declined to pursue charges.

Following a report on the incident in The Washington Post, Fairfax County police investigated and said they found no “credible information” that Torres had gang ties.

Fairfax County police have yet to explain how their investigation into MS-13 ties sputtered and yet prosecutors plan to introduce this in the murder trial. Something doesn’t add up.

As mentioned above, I don’t think the authors at CNN really want President Trump tweeting about the murder of Nabra Hassanen. I also think it’s likely the reason he didn’t do so early on is that this was seen for many months as a hate crime first and foremost (many still see it that way) or possibly a road rage incident. But like the Tibbetts case, Hassanen was (allegedly) murdered by someone who should not have been here. That’s something Trump should talk about and which the media should not prevent us from talking about.