Joseph M. Czuba (left) stabbed 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume and the child’s mother, Hanaan Shahin, deputies said. (Mug shot: Will County Sheriff’s Office; image of Al-Fayoume: CAIR-Chicago)
Federal investigators announced Sunday that they have launched a hate crime investigation into the stabbing death of a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy who was allegedly killed by his landlord over the war between Israel and Hamas.
Wadea Al-Fayoume was killed Saturday and his mother Hanaan Shahin was seriously injured when their landlord Joseph M. Czuba, 71, allegedly stabbed his tenants at their apartment in Will County, Illinois. As Law&Crime previously reported, deputies said that Czuba stabbed his tenants with a serrated military knife that had a 7-inch blade.
“On behalf of the entire Justice Department, I want to express my deepest condolences to his family and his community as they grieve his loss,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement published Sunday. “The Department is limited in what more it can say because this is an ongoing criminal investigation.”
Law enforcement said Czuba attacked the family because they were Muslim and because of the Israel-Hamas war, which started after the terrorist organization Hamas launched a wide-scale attack on border towns in southern Israel on Saturday, Oct. 7, going as far as to kidnap and kill civilians. Israel’s military response has devastated the civilian population in the city of Gaza.
In a statement, President Joe Biden decried Wadea’s killing.
“The child’s Palestinian Muslim family came to America seeking what we all seek — a refuge to live, learn, and pray in peace,” the White House said in a statement. “This horrific act of hate has no place in America, and stands against our fundamental values: freedom from fear for how we pray, what we believe, and who we are.”
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A prominent Muslim civil rights group demanded that the attack be investigated as a hate crime.
“According to written text messages reportedly sent to the father of the boy by the mother from the hospital and shared with CAIR-Chicago, the landlord who had been angry with what he was seeing in the news knocked on their door, and when she opened, he tried to choke her and proceeded to attack her with a knife, yelling ‘you Muslims must die!’” CAIR-Chicago said in a press release. “When she ran into the bathroom to call 911, she came out to find that he had stabbed her six-year-old son to death.”
Shanin survived with more than a dozen stab wounds to her body, authorities said. But Wadea sustained 26 stab wounds, dying at the hospital. He had celebrated his birthday a couple of weeks before Czuba killed him, CAIR-Chicago said.
The organization said that mother and son had been living in the ground floor of the residence for two years with no previous problems with Czuba.
The sheriff’s office arrested the landlord for first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, and two counts of a hate crime. The U.S. Department of Justice’s new announcement raises the possibility of federal charges.
“This incident cannot help but further raise the fears of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities in our country with regard to hate-fueled violence,” Garland said. “The Department of Justice is focused on protecting the safety and the civil rights of every person in this country. We will use every legal authority at our disposal to bring to justice those who perpetrate illegal acts of hate. No one in the United States of America should have to live in fear of violence because of how they worship or where they or their family come from.”
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