Oak Creek, Wisconsin

Oak Creek is a city south of Milwaukee in Wisconsin and the home of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. Satwant Singh Kaleka, who helped found the temple in 1997, was its president.

Key moments

• 5 August 2012: on a Sunday morning, with the first 911 calls at 10:26 a.m., Wade Michael Page, a 40-year-old Army veteran and former leader of a white supremacist band, opens fire with a 9 mm handgun. He kills six: Satwant Singh Kaleka (65), Prakash Singh (39), Paramjit Kaur (41), Sita Singh (41), Ranjit Singh (49) and Suveg Singh (84). Kaleka was shot after trying to stop him with a knife.
• The first police officer to arrive, Lieutenant Brian Murphy, is shot repeatedly, nine times by the first count and twelve by a later one. Officer Sam Lenda hits Page with a rifle and Page then shoots himself in the head.
• August 2012: the congregation is given the temple back four days later. Spokesman Kulwant Singh Dhaliwal says the nationwide vigils showed that grief shared is grief halved.
• September 2012: at a Senate hearing chaired by Dick Durbin, Harpreet Singh Saini, whose mother was killed, asks the government to give her “the dignity of being a statistic”. The Justice Department says it will review the hate crime categories, since “Sikh” is not one.
• 2015: the FBI and Justice Department add Sikhs, Hindus and Arabs to the hate crime data they collect, a change Asia Samachar says the Oak Creek attack helped hasten.
• 2 March 2020: Baba Punjab Singh, paralysed by a bullet that day, dies after seven and a half years. His son says his death and the lives lost that day remind the country of the hate that remains.
• 5 August 2022: at the tenth anniversary a candlelight vigil is held, with Governor Tony Evers among the speakers, and Sikh motorcyclists ride 2,700 miles from Stockton to Oak Creek.

What it means today. Oak Creek is where six Sikhs were killed at worship, and where the United States began to count crimes against Sikhs as a category of their own.