Rhode Island Mosque Shooting Called a 'Hate Crime' in 2023 Was a Personal Dispute, Police Say

A shooting outside a Providence, Rhode Island mosque in late 2023 was widely reported as an anti-Muslim hate crime. Providence police now say that label was wrong.

The shooting happened weeks after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, a period when reports of anti-Muslim incidents were rising nationwide. A 52-year-old man, Dean Scott Mustafa Ramos, was shot in the buttocks outside the Islamic Center of Rhode Island (ICRI) while selling Islamic books. He was treated and released from the hospital within two hours, according to a police report.

Ramos said he was targeted because of his religion. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the country's largest Muslim civil rights organization, publicly pushed for the shooting to be investigated as a bias crime. CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper said at the time that "we have witnessed an unprecedented spike in anti-Muslim incidents nationwide in recent weeks" and urged law enforcement to look at a possible bias motive.

The framing appeared in international headlines. But according to an investigation by Real Clear Investigations, later reported by the New York Post, the facts tell a different story.

Major David Lapatin, commanding officer of the Investigative Division of the Providence Police Department, told the Post flatly: "It was absolutely not a hate crime." Court records show Ramos is a convicted drug dealer who served five years in prison for manufacturing and distributing drugs. The man identified as the shooter, Nasir Dupont, is described in the investigation as a Muslim convert with a lengthy criminal record covering illegal gun possession, robbery, and drug offenses. Dupont is currently in prison awaiting trial on separate drug and weapons charges.

Lapatin told the Post the two men were known to each other and appeared to have had a personal dispute predating the shooting. The case has not been prosecuted, which police attribute to a lack of evidence. Neither Ramos nor Dupont is currently cooperating with investigators, and neither could be reached for comment by the Post.

The initial concern about a hate crime was rooted in documented reality. The period after October 7, 2023 did see a real spike in reports of anti-Muslim incidents across the country, and advocacy groups pointing to a shooting outside a mosque during that window were not inventing the timing. Asking law enforcement to examine a possible bias motive in a shooting at a religious site, especially amid documented tension, is defensible. The problem here isn't that CAIR asked for an investigation. It's that the hate crime label stuck in headlines and public consciousness well before police determined it didn't hold up, and there's no indication CAIR later corrected the record once the personal-dispute explanation emerged.

That gap matters. Once a shooting gets branded a hate crime in national and international coverage, the correction rarely travels as far as the original claim. Ramos's own criminal history and his personal history with Dupont are facts that undercut the religious-bias narrative, and those facts only came out once investigators dug into court records.

The Post's investigation also raises a separate issue that got far less attention than the shooting itself: sermons delivered at ICRI, the mosque where the shooting occurred. The Post cites a December 2023 sermon in which Jews were described as "corrupters" to be "punished" and as "prophet killers." According to Real Clear Investigations, CAIR and the mosque's imam, Abdul-Latif Sackor, were made aware of examples of anti-Christian and jihad-endorsing rhetoric from the mosque but did not denounce it.

That raises a legitimate accountability question independent of the shooting. If a civil rights group is quick to demand hate-crime investigations into incidents affecting its own community, it's fair to ask why the same group wouldn't be equally quick to condemn bigoted rhetoric coming from within a mosque it was actively defending in the press.

None of this means anti-Muslim hate crimes don't happen or shouldn't be investigated seriously when they do. But this case is a documented example of a shooting labeled a hate crime in national headlines that police now say was a personal dispute between two men with overlapping criminal histories. No charges have been filed in the shooting itself. CAIR has not, based on available reporting, issued a public correction or update reflecting the police finding. Whether it does is an open question worth tracking.