Joseph M. Czuba stabbed a 6-year-old boy to death because the victim was Muslim, deputies said. (Mugshot: Will County Sheriff’s Office)
A landlord stabbed a mother and her 6-year-old son, killing the child, because the victims were Muslim and because of the war between Israel and Hamas. Deputies in Will County, Illinois, called Joseph M. Czuba’s alleged actions a “senseless and cowardly act of violence.”
Authorities said that the mother — identified by civil rights organization CAIR-Chicago as Hanaan Shahin — called 911 on Saturday morning to say that her landlord had attacked her with a knife. According to deputies, she said she ran into the bathroom and continued to fight him off as she dialed 911.
“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. “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.”
The organization identified the child as 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume. He celebrated his birthday a couple of weeks before he died.
Deputes said they arrived at the home in unincorporated Plainfield Township to find Czuba, 71, sitting upright on the ground near the driveway of the home. They took him to a hospital because of a laceration to his forehead.
Law enforcement said they found the woman and the child in the residence suffering from stab wounds to their chest, torso, and upper extremities.
Authorities, who did not name the victims, said the woman was in serious condition from more than a dozen stab wounds to her body, but she is expected to survive.
The child was taken to the hospital in critical condition, but he died there. (Deputies at first gave his age as 8, but later said he was 6.)
“On 10/15/2023, an autopsy was conducted on the six-year-old victim.,” deputies wrote. “The forensic pathologist conducting the autopsy removed the knife from the abdomen of the boy at that time. The six-year-old boy was stabbed twenty-six (26) times throughout his body. The knife used in this attack is a twelve-inch serrated military style knife that has a seven-inch blade.”
CAIR-Chicago said that mother and son had lived on the ground floor of the home for two years with no previous problems with Czuba.
After his release from the hospital, Czuba allegedly told investigators nothing about the attack, but authorities said they were able to find enough information from interviews and other evidence to charge him with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, and two counts of hate crime.
“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” detectives wrote.
CAIR-Chicago says that lopsided statements from officials and media coverage created the atmosphere in which this crime happened
“This unthinkable senseless crime did not happen in a vacuum,” CAIR-Chicago Executive Director Ahmed Rehab said.
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