Every mass tragedy begets a frantic search for answers, for a common understanding of what happened, for a narrative, and the 2016 Pulse massacre was no different.

Not long after Omar Mateen opened fire inside a bustling gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the media scrambled to understand his depraved actions. Almost overnight, a narrative emerged that until now has been impossible to dislodge: Mateen planned and executed an attack on Pulse because he hated gay people.

Lets say it plainly: This was a mass slaying aimed at LGBT people , Tim Teeman wrote in The Daily Beast. The massacre was undeniably a homophobic hate crime , Jeet Heer wrote in The New Republic. Some speculated that Mateen was a closeted gay man. He was likely trying to reconcile his inner feelings with his strongly homophobic Muslim culture, James S. Robbins wrote in USA Today.

There was compelling evidence of other motivations. Mateen had pledged allegiance to the self-described Islamic State during the shooting, and explicitly said that he was acting to avenge air strikes in the Middle East. You have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. They are killing a lot of innocent people, he told a crisis negotiator over the phone while at Pulse. What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. You get what Im saying?

But this was a tricky thing to get a handle on 49 dead and another 53 wounded, so many of them members of a historically marginalized and persecuted group. How could they not have been targeted? To say that the attack was not rooted in homophobia, one commenter wrote in USA Today, was to erase the LGBT community causing only more pain by invalidating their experiences.

Over the past two weeks in Orlando, Mateens widow, Noor Salman, was tried for having allegedly helped him plan his attack. The popular understanding of the Pulse shooting as a carefully targeted massacre was on trial as well. And in acquitting Salman , 31, on Friday, a jury also delivered a verdict on the story wed told ourselves about the killings: Wed gotten it wrong.

In the wake of the shooting, the media and public focused on certain details, many of which were later determined to be unfounded, and discounted others, like Mateens own explanation for his actions. If Mateen had indeed been motivated by something other than homophobia, the grief and terror of the gay community were no less real and no less urgent for it. But the narrative that was repeated and turned into fact that Mateen had picked Pulse because of who its patrons were and what they represented had the effect of obscuring another, smaller injustice: the prosecution of Mateens wife.

A Muslim woman who by her familys account was beaten by Mateen, Salman might have been a sympathetic figure in a different context. But I think now of Bob Kunsts sign. A longtime human rights activist, Kunst was protesting outside the federal courthouse, just two miles from the nightclub where the tragedy occurred, as Salmans trial began. FRY HER, his sign read, TILL SHE HAS NO PULSE. It didnt seem to occur to many people that Noor Salman might have been a victim of Mateen, too .

The media missed the story, Charles Swift, one of Salmans lawyers said, because they depended on the government to tell it to them.