Remembering the Oak Creek killings, a harbinger of white supremacist violence

But for a notebook, it could have turned out very differently.

They were supposed to be at the Gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, but Pardeep Singh Kaleka's daughter had made them turn back around.

"It was only because my daughter had forgot a notebook at the house," Kaleka says, "that we were not inside the temple at the time."

They were still 10 minutes away when a white supremacist walked into the Oak Creek, Wisc., Sikh temple and opened fire, shooting 10 people, killing six — seven if you count Baba Punjab Singh who was partially paralyzed and died from the wound in 2020.

Then he turned the gun on himself.

This weekend, Kaleka and other survivors are marking the 10th anniversary of the Oak Creek massacre. At the time, it was the deadliest hate crime in a place of worship in the United States.

Kaleka's father, Satwant Singh Kaleka was the Gurdwara's founder. He was killed that day.

"My mom was able to survive by hiding in a closet with other women that were there," Kaleka says.

Kaleka thinks a lot about what it means to survive hate, 10 years later. He says this anniversary feels like neither a