On Monday they buried 7-year-old Hser Ner Moo, a Burmese Karen (Christian) refugee girl. 500 mourners, including the governor of Utah, attended her funeral. The little girl who loved school and wearing pink clothes, had allegedly been raped and beaten to death by a 21-year-old refugee from the same camp in Thailand.
A week to the day after she disappeared, an estimated 500 mourners, including Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and his wife, Mary Kaye Huntsman, attended her funeral Monday at the South Salt Lake LDS Haven Ward Chapel.
The number of mourners was perhaps larger than Utah’s entire Burmese refugee community to which she belonged.
In the same paper on Tuesday, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the murder suspect faces the death penalty.
Seven-year-old Hser Ner Moo apparently tried to fight the man who allegedly beat, raped and strangled her last week at a South Salt Lake apartment complex.
An autopsy revealed she was clutching hair in her right hand similar to that of accused killer Esar Met. And the autopsy showed Hser Ner Moo had been beaten about the head, neck, and torso. Some injuries were consistent with strangulation or suffocation.
That information and more – including evidence of sexual assault and a bloody footprint matching Esar Met – was included in documents charging the 21-year-old with aggravated murder. The crime is punishable by death.
But, no reporter seems to have the guts to go beyond this standard superficial reporting.
And, yes, before someone pounces and tells me that white American guys are also rapists and murderers, I’m not saying they aren’t. I am saying that maybe this terrible tragedy could have been averted, and someone now needs to look deeper.
From a reliable source, someone who works with the camps in Thailand, we have heard that Burmese Muslims get into the camps and tensions run high with the Karen people, then our naive (at best) US State Department and the contractors who resettle them in the US place them in the same neighborhoods. In this case they were placed in the same building.
We have it from those same sources that Met is a Muslim, and we suggest reporters begin to do some serious work on this case, if there are any investigative minds out there! For those of you saying, it doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t, it does. It matters because resettlement agencies need to start facing the reality of the tensions in the world and be sensible about what refugees can be placed together. We also need to ask why are we bringing all these single men in the refugee program.
The proponents of refugee resettlement can’t be running some grand experiment in multiculturalism at the expense of children like Hser.
P.S. If it turns out I’m wrong I’ll admit it. But, someone first needs to find out the truth about how the murder suspect, Esar Met, came to be living in America in the same building with this little girl.
Note: See our earlier coverage of this story here.