A man in Florida charged with attempted murder in the shooting of two tourists in Miami Beach on Saturday — he told the police he had thought they were Palestinian — is attributing the violence to a “severe” mental health episode.
The man, Mordechai Brafman, 27, was driving when he stopped his truck and got out to shoot at two people according to a police report. He told the police that he had killed them.
The victims turned out to be Israeli Jewish tourists, neither of whom was seriously wounded, and Mr. Brafman, who is also Jewish, now faces charges on two counts of second-degree attempted murder.
Identity-related violence targeting Muslims and Arabs, as well as Jews, has surged since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent decimation of the Gaza Strip, according to advocacy groups.
Dustin Tischler, Mr. Brafman’s lawyer, said that his client appeared before a judge on Tuesday morning and was being held in jail, with his next hearing set for Friday. He was denied bond on Monday.
Mr. Tischler said that his client had “no prior history of violent or hateful behavior” and that he was cooperating with law enforcement. His client acknowledged the seriousness of the charges, he said, but had not been able to control his actions.
“At the time of the incident, Mr. Brafman was experiencing a severe mental health crisis which caused him to be in fear for his life,” the lawyer said in a text message to The New York Times. “It is believed that his ability to make sound judgments was significantly compromised.”
Mr. Tischler said he and his client were “committed to working with medical professionals to ensure Mr. Brafman receives appropriate and necessary treatment.”
Local media reported that the victims of the shooting were a father and son who identified themselves as Yaron and Ari Rabi and said they were in Florida for vacation. They told a Miami television station that Mr. Brafman had shot at them multiple times and continued shooting while they drove away to seek help at a nearby condominium building. The son was shot in the shoulder and the father was grazed by a bullet on his forearm.
Antisemitic and Islamophobic speech proliferated across the internet after the conflict between Israel and Hamas broke out, and violence related to the war has become relatively common around the world.
In Illinois, a Palestinian American woman was injured and her son was killed by their landlord about 10 days into the fighting in Gaza. Just weeks later, in Vermont, three Palestinian Americans were shot.
In the final months of 2023 in New York, several people were charged with hate crimes, including a woman who threw her cellphone and hot coffee at a man in Brooklyn while making anti-Islamic statements, teenagers who attacked people in a Brooklyn synagogue and a man who stalked and harassed five men wearing skullcaps while making antisemitic statements.
The violence continued into the next year.
In February 2024, a Palestinian American man was stabbed in Texas. Months later in the same state, a 3-year-old Palestinian American girl survived an attempted drowning that was apparently related to her identity. An argument over the war that broke out between a pro-Israel protester and a passerby in Massachusetts in September escalated into a physical struggle that ended with both men charged with crimes.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations said that discrimination and attacks against Muslims and Palestinians surged after the war began in 2023 and rose by about 70 percent in the first half of 2024 amid heightened tensions stemming from the conflict.
The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations on Sunday called on the state and federal authorities to charge Mr. Brafman with a hate crime, which increases the potential penalties for an offense, based on his stated intentions. The fact that his victims were not of Palestinian descent does not change the nature of the attack, the group said.
“It is the alleged shooter’s reportedly bias-motivated actions, not the actual ethnicity of the victims, that should be the determining factor for charges in this disturbing case,” the council said.
The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Local news media reported on Tuesday that prosecutors had said they would charge Mr. Brafman with a hate crime.
Mr. Tischler did not respond to a request for comment on the hate-crime element of the case. He did, however, express deep relief on the part of Mr. Brafman that the victims were out of the hospital and seemed to be recovering.
