A family returned home from a trip to New York to find their apartment ransacked and messages of hate scrawled on the wall. (Photo courtesy of CAIR)

An Alexandria family returned home from a trip to New York on Monday to find a message of hate scrawled on their living room and their Quran ripped up into shreds. Electronics, important documents, family heirlooms, and jewelry are all gone. So, too, is their sense of security.

Fairfax Police are investigating the break-in, which occurred some time between March 24 and 27, as a hate crime.

Mahrukh and Shoaib, who preferred that their last names not be used, took their two young children up to New York to spend one last weekend with Shoaib’s parents before they returned to Dubai after an extended trip to the United States. Shoaib even took Monday off from his job at Merrill Lynch so the kids could have some extra time with their grandparents.

Instead, a maintenance worker spotted the scene and the couple got a call in the morning alerting them that their home had been broken into sometime over the weekend. The family rushed back.

“It was like a tornado came into our home … everything was on the floor, basically,” Mahrukh says. “The worst thing was the Quran—it was torn and the pages were all over the floor. There was f*** Muslims written on the wall.”

People who track Islamophobic incidents say it is part of a growing wave of anti-Muslim crimes seen across the country over the past few months.

“We’re seeing a really unprecedented spike in anti-Muslim incidents nationwide,” says Ibrahim Hooper, the national communications director for CAIR. “Every day, we’re having not just one but more than one incident report, whereas, in the past, an incident like this might take place once a month.”

Mahrukh, a novelty cake decorator and artist, says she hadn’t experienced anything of the sort since moving to the U.S. last year to “live out the American dream.” People have generally been kind and welcoming to their family, she says.

They planned to buy a “nice family home” to raise their kids in and start their own businesses—Shoaib in personal finance and Mahrukh a bakery. She had hoped to have the bakery going by the end of the year.

Instead, they will have to sort through the wreckage of their lives and salvage what they can. Much of what they lost can’t be replaced, jewelry from their wedding and family heirlooms given to their daughter. Others, like laptops and electronics, will cost thousands to replace. And then there is the matter of nearly all their documentation.

The couple created an emergency wallet in case they ever needed to leave in a hurry—putting together $3,500 in cash, their passports, green cards, and other documents all in one place.

“Everything was in that wallet, and that wallet is gone,” Mahrukh says.

The family is staying with an aunt as they work to clean up the apartment, but they won’t return permanently. Mahrukh says they can’t shake the fright and feeling of insecurity, and they have already started looking at new apartments.

Still, they aren’t giving up on their dreams, even if the break-in will likely set them back years. “Whatever has happened has made us braver,” she says. “I don’t think anything worse can happen.”

Update: A GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family recover.