I drove out to Arivaca, Arizona, on Tuesday, the day after a jury convicted Shawna Forde of two counts of first-degree murder in the home-invasion shooting deaths of 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul Junior Flores. I went to take some pictures, look around, and get a feel for the landscape, both physical and cultural.

Mostly, I wanted to see how the murders had rippled through the community, because distant rural places like this are always tight-knit communities where everyone knows everyone else. Everyone I talked to used the same word: "Devastating."

A woman at the community center just down the street knew Brisenia and her mother -- who did volunteer work at the center -- very well. She pointed to a picture of Brisenia hanging on a main beam inside the center, a black flower attached to a corner, and explained, "She came here every day." Brisenia, she said, was bright and sweet and devoted to her parents, as they were to her.

The murders, she told me, took place only two days before the start of the community center's annual summer camp, where Brisenia always enrolled, and where all the kids in the camp knew her too. The center brought in grief counselors to try to help the kids understand what had happened to their classmate and friend. She said she kept trying to explain to them that they were never going to see her again, and they couldn't grasp it. Finally, she said, she had to simply tell them straight out that she was dead. And then everyone cried.

"It was horrible," she said.

Arivaca is a little ranching community where the main activity is at the feed store during work hours and at the mercantile and bar the rest of the day. It mainly exists for services to ranchers in the Arizona desert. And it is only 28 miles, by the road to Sasabe (and slightly shorter as the crow flies) from the Mexico border.

Thus, it used to be quite a popular thoroughfare for border-crossing immigrants, but everyone in town told me that most of that had gone away in the past couple of years, thanks to an intense increase in the presence of the Border Patrol in the area. And it was true: I passed a Border Patrol checkpoint going to and from Arivaca, and encountered probably 20 different BP vehicles in different locales along the 23-mile drive between the town and I-19.

The immigrant traffic also drew people like Shawna Forde -- people who hated immigrants crossing the border from Mexico and were determined to stop it. And so a little girl whose parents, and grandparents, and their whole extended family, had grown up American in Arivaca wound up becoming a victim of the radicalism and hatemongering turned to violence that always, inevitably accompanies the Nativist mindset.

The Flores' home was just down the dirt road from the community center about a mile, part of a rural neighborhood that northeast of the town itself, a bunch of small homes spread out on large tracts.

The place had been mostly cleaned up since the tragedy, but there were little signs outside: plastic roses placed on the door the killers had come through; a child's lamp, and a sign for a garden, and a teeter-totter. All the signs of a normal, simple, sweet life suddenly ripped away by something monstrous from out of nowhere.

When a sweet, innocent life is cut short like this -- especially by an act as monstrous as this one -- it always horrifies us, just as the case of another Arizona 9-year-old slain by a madman, Christina Green, has resonated deeply with the public. And so often in such cases, the monstrousness and the tragedy simply overwhelm us, leaving us to throw up our hands and decide that it's beyond our understanding, that there's no explaining such events.

But there's no such mystery about what killed Brisenia. We know. We can see it clearly. And we need to be talking about it.

The people who broke into her home late at night while she was sleeping with her new puppy on the living-room couch and cold-bloodedly shot her in the face while she pleaded for her life were people who did not see her, or her father or mother, as human beings. They were people who had become so accustomed to dehumanizing Latinos that they didn't care about the devastation they brought to Arivaca and the lives of this family. They were so consumed by hate that they had no humanity left themselves.

The dehumanizing language of scapegoating and eliminationism -- the naming and targeting of other humans for the supposed social ills they incur, followed as always by words urging their excision from society, if not the world -- is endemic on the American Right. And among right-wing extremists, it intensifies, grows and metastasizes into something lethal and monstrous.

You can hear this very language in Shawna Forde's 2007 appearance at a Yakima "town hall" forum on immigration: