By the time investigators finished their first statements, the facts no longer mattered. The uniforms had already become a kind of Rorschach test for a city on edge. To some, they were a rehearsal for political violence; to others, a clumsy stunt twisted into something darker. The cardboard box outside the cemetery felt less like litter and more like a warning that nobody could quite read the same way.
As voices rose, the word “killers” stopped belonging to one woman and became a floating accusation, ready to be pinned on whoever you already feared. Politicians, police, organizers, commentators—each wrapped themselves in the idea of the uniform, insisting they alone spoke for its honor or its victims. In the end, the most unsettling possibility wasn’t that someone staged a threat, but that New York had become a place where even a pile of empty fabric could start a war over who counts as “us” at all.