Joseph Czuba faces life in prison for the murder of 6-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi, just days after Israel’s war on Gaza began.
A jury in the US state of Illinois has convicted a man of murder and hate crime charges for the October 2023 stabbing death of a six-year-old Palestinian American boy.
Joseph Czuba, 73, was found guilty on Friday and faces life in prison when he is sentenced in May for a murder that prosecutors said was motivated by anti-Muslim hatred. The attack also left the boy’s mother critically injured, according to court records.
The murder of Wadee Alfayoumi and the assault on his mother, Hanan Shaheen, was one of the earliest and most severe hate crime incidents in the US since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Czuba, who was Shaheen and her son’s landlord, stabbed the boy 26 times with a military-style knife featuring a 7-inch (18-cm) serrated blade, authorities reported. Shaheen sustained multiple stab wounds in the attack, which occurred in Plainfield Township, approximately 40 miles (64 km) southwest of Chicago.
During the trial this week, Shaheen testified that Czuba told her, “You, as a Muslim, must die.”
Michael Fitzgerald, a prosecutor with the Will County State’s Attorney’s Office, presented a recording of a 911 call during the trial.
“The landlord is killing me and my baby,” Shaheen is heard saying on the recording.
Czuba had earlier pleaded not guilty and chose not to testify during the trial that began on Tuesday.
‘All our children were targeted’
The case drew global headlines and deeply impacted the Chicago area’s large and established Palestinian community.
“All of us who are parents, who are Arab or Palestinian … who are Muslim, we all saw our children die in Wadee Alfayoumi, because this could have been any one of our boys, any one of our girls,” said Ahmed Rehab of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-Chicago, according to The Associated Press.
“It just so happened that it was Wadee Alfayoumi. When he was targeted, all of our children were targeted. Every Muslim was targeted when he [Czuba] yelled, ‘All Muslims must die.’”
Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), stated that the verdict delivers a measure of justice for Wadee’s family and “sends a clear message that hate-fueled violence has no place here.”
“We will never accept nor forget that a six-year-old child lost his life because of dangerous anti-Palestinian rhetoric,” he said, according to AFP.
Other recent incidents in the US raising concerns about anti-Arab bias include the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian American girl in Texas, the stabbing of a Palestinian American man in Texas, the beating of a Muslim man in New York, a violent mob attack on pro-Palestinian protesters in California, and a Florida shooting of two Israeli visitors whom the suspect mistakenly believed to be Palestinians.
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