Back in February, two elderly men in San Francisco were murdered on the same day. One of them was famous private investigator Jack Palladino. The other was an 84-year-old man named Vicha Ratanapakdee. You may recall this video of the attack that led to his death.

LATEST: Horrific video of fatal attack Thursday on 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee. Details -> https://t.co/6Z5rqIQpcZ pic.twitter.com/PJnuuWgE3Y

— Evan Sernoffsky (@EvanSernoffsky) February 1, 2021

The man who ran across the street to knock him down was later arrested and charged with murder. His name is Antoine Watson and he is 19-years-old.

Tuesday NY Times Magazine published a lengthy story about that case titled “Why Was Vicha Ratanapakdee Killed?” I was curious what the story would reveal. Unfortunately, despite promising some sort of explanation in the headline the lengthy piece doesn’t really deliver much that might make sense of this attack.

What it does offer is a lot of detail about the victim, Vicha Ratanapakdee, who lived with his wife, his daughter Monthanus, her husband Eric and their two sons. He’d had several heart surgeries in recent years and liked to go walking in the morning to keep his strength up. On January 28, he left the house in the morning and never returned. When his daughter called his phone a while later thinking he’d probably decided to go shopping, a police officer answered and told her that her father had been taken to the hospital with “severe trauma.” Two days later, Vicha died in the hospital from his injuries.

Shortly after Vicha was pronounced dead, Monthanus’s phone rang. A homicide detective gave his condolences and said they were planning to charge the attack as a murder. Why would you call me when my father just died? Monthanus wondered at first, her mind thick with shock. She had learned small details about the suspect from her initial conversations with the police: male, 19 years old, African American. But her mind swirled with bigger questions. Where did the assault happen? What made her father bleed out like that? How long did he lie outside before an ambulance arrived? What kind of person would do this?

Those are the questions I think a lot of people who watched the video clip above had at the time. So what are the answers to those questions?

San Francisco’s district attorney charged Antoine Watson, the 19-year-old accused of shoving Vicha to death, with murder and elder abuse. Watson, the court documents state, had been cited for “reckless driving, speeding and failure to stop at a stop sign” in the hours before the attack. One witness at the scene told officers that he saw “a Black male, 18 to 30 years old,” approach and “stand over” an elderly man lying on the ground. Another witness said he heard a voice yelling: “Why you looking at me? Why you looking at me?” and then “a crushing sound.”

Watson pleaded not guilty. His public defender, Sliman Nawabi, challenged the murder charge, arguing that Watson did not intend to kill Vicha. Nawabi described the incident as an “impulsive unmotivated assault” that resulted from the mental-health breakdown of a teenager. He told me that Watson lost his job and support structure during the pandemic; in addition to attending college classes and working at FedEx, he had previously gone to therapy and taken medication. At Watson’s bail hearing, Nawabi said he recognized “the racial overtones” of the case, but added, “This false narrative that this is a targeted attack on the Asian community or an elderly man is misleading and prejudicial.” He asked the court to order a neuropsychological evaluation and proposed releasing Watson to home confinement, where his family could look after him, along with requiring therapy and counseling, so that Watson wouldn’t become “another statistic in the criminal-justice world.”

The denial of the racial overtones of the case is the thing that ultimately frustrated Monthanus (the daughter) and Eric (the son-in-law) most. Even as Vicha’s face was becoming part of a protest movement against anti-Asian hate crimes, when they spoke to DA Boudin, he gave them the cold shoulder with regard to hate crime charges.

On Feb. 4, the couple spoke with San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, on a call. A former public defender, Boudin was part of a new wave of progressive prosecutors who entered office the year before with the promise of reform. Monthanus and Eric voted for him. Now they wanted action. “We were like, ‘Is this a hate crime?’ He was like, ‘I can’t talk about this,’” Eric says. “It was just the way that he answered the question that made me feel like he didn’t really care about our emotions, about what we were asking about.”…

The weeks went on, and Monthanus and Eric sank deeper into their grief as their suspicions mounted — toward homicide investigators, who never seemed able to give a straight answer; toward the district attorney, who seemed to put his interests before theirs; and toward Antoine Watson, about whom they knew little beyond the gaping hole he left in their lives. The court system, which they thought would deliver swift justice, was confoundingly slow. By then, Boudin had told reporters that there was no evidence from the police suggesting that Vicha’s death was motivated by racial animus.

In the absence of any sense of resolution, the couple began searching for clues on their own. Several people suggested that there was more to the video that went viral, which prompted Monthanus to walk around the block to knock on neighbors’ doors and ask if they would share their security-camera footage. Only one agreed. The video was taken from the same angle as the clip that everyone saw, only this footage was longer. Monthanus could now see her father enter the frame as he climbed up the hill and to a corner where he would have continued straight. Instead, he paused for a moment and turned right, as though whatever caught his eye made him decide to change course. After the attack, as her father lay on the ground, a couple driving by stopped to place a blanket on him. As she replayed the footage again and again, Monthanus kept coming back to the same conclusion. “He didn’t take anything from my father, not even the tablet,” she says. “I got everything back — the house key, even the quarter.” Eric fixated on the footage, too. “That’s when I was like: ‘This is more than some kind of accident or robbery or assault. This is a hate crime.’”…

In several prime-time interviews, including on “Nightline” and CNN, Eric went on to suggest that Vicha’s death was not a random outlier but a result of one race targeting another. His comments tugged at a bigger, messier debate about race that had been building around the attacks. In the Bay Area, where Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up a quarter of the population, stories like Vicha’s sparked at least two opposing narratives. One was that there was a pattern of Black perpetrators and Asian victims, that the pattern was a symptom of a tension dating back decades. Another was that such a pattern was not only false, but that the belief in it was a racist misperception.

Was it a hate crime? Possibly. There’s no other clear explanation for why this attack happened. And it fits a pattern we saw play out earlier this year when a number of high profile attacks on Asian people were carried out by black suspects. Despite the pattern, activists in New York held a rally against white supremacy in response. The poster announcing the rally was an image of Vicha Tatanapakdee, which really didn’t make a lot of sense.

There’s a “March Against White Nationalism” today in NYC re recent violence against Asians, and this is the social image promoting it. Uhh is there a shred of evidence that 84 year old Vicha Ratanapakdee was killed by “white nationalism”? https://t.co/rsFW2qZQwx pic.twitter.com/XE3VMv0Uy1

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) February 20, 2021

That sort of disconnect is clearly a part of this story. Monthanus and Eric weren’t the only people outraged about what they see as a hate crime not being treated as such. However, it’s instructive to compare their story to the massage parlor shootings that happened just a few weeks later in Atlanta.

In that case, 6 out of 8 victims were Asian so again there was a presumption that race played a role. However, the 22-year-old shooter, who was white, claimed that wasn’t the case, that he’d targeted businesses which he felt were harming his recovery from sex addiction. There was evidence to support the idea that he really believed that as he’d been part of a sex addiction recovery ministry. Nevertheless, there was a lot of outrage over that claim at the time. How could the attack not be a hate crime? Some even suggested police were protecting a white supremacist shooter from the full force of the law. And in the end, prosecutors did decide to bring hate crime charges against the shooter and also decided to pursue the death penalty.

But in the case of Vicha Ratanapakdee’s death, there doesn’t seem to be the same urgency to make an example out of Antoine Watson. It’s another mystery that the NY Times Magazine piece can’t quite explain.