Some activists and commentators compared the crime to the shooting of Trayvon Martin that had taken place less than a month earlier. The hoodie that Martin was wearing was said to feed into racial profiling that led an armed civilian to shoot the unarmed teenager; Alawadi's hijab was similarly said to have marked her as Muslim to the person who murdered her.[7][8] The death was initially portrayed in the media as a hate crime, due to the note left with the body, and thus an act of Islamophobia.[9]