“I hated Muslims.”

That’s what John Dutcher, a 61-year-old house cleaner in Omaha, Nebraska, recently admitted in interviews with both The Washington Post and KETV.

He told the Post that he had been “one of those guys who would want to put a pig’s head on a mosque.” (Pork-based hate crimes targeting Muslims are common in the U.S., including in Omaha.) And he’d “sneer at” women wearing headscarfs of hijabs, he said to KETV ― even though he had never actually met a Muslim person before. 

Then six families of refugees, including from Syria and Afghanistan, moved into his apartment building. They were Muslim.