What She Left Behind

Michael Kruse: WESTERVILLE, Ohio — Rifqa Bary saw a girl. She kept seeing her. She saw her in the bathroom and the lunch room and the locker room.

"And for some reason," Rifqa said later, in a video posted on YouTube, "I told her I was a Christian."

Which she wasn't. Not yet.

"Wanted to fit in, maybe," she said.

Eventually she would run away from her home here and flee to Florida, believing her Muslim family had to kill her because of her conversion to Christianity. Eventually she would become for some a critical character in a culture war. Eventually her story would fill TV airtime, stoke partisan blogs and spark dueling custody cases in courts in two states.

But this is where it started: Rifqa saw a girl. The girl asked her to go to church. So she went.