Washington Post: Landlord sentenced for murdering 6-year-old Palestinian American boy
Felix Sarver/AP
An Illinois landlord was sentenced Friday to 53 years in prison for murdering a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy and severely wounding his mother during an October 2023 hate crime.
Joseph Czuba, 73, fatally stabbed the child, Wadee Alfayoumi, and wounded his mother, Hanan Shaheen, a week after Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel that year. Shaheen and her son were renting a room inside Czuba’s house in Plainfield, about 40 miles southwest of Chicago.
Czuba was convicted of first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, aggravated battery and two counts of hate crime in February.
“There is no sentence that can be imposed to bring justice for the heinous actions Czuba took,” Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow said in a statement. “The cruelty of this morally reprehensible killer and the impact of his violent conduct on this innocent child and mother is truly unfathomable.”
At the courthouse Friday, Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak handed down to Czuba 30 years for Alfayoumi’s death, an additional 20 years consecutively for Shaheen’s attack and three years for the hate crimes, according to the Will County state’s attorney office.
Joseph Czuba at his arraignment at the Will County, Illinois, courthouse, Oct. 30, 2023, in Joliet, Illinois.© Charles Rex Arbogast/AP
Czuba had been friendly with the boy and his mother before the attack in the Middle East, building the boy a tree house and allowing him to use the swimming pool, The Washington Post reported. But “something changed” in the days following Oct. 7, 2023, and Czuba grew suspicious of the mother and son due to their background and religion, The Post reported.
In a statement Friday, the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called Czuba’s lengthy sentence “a necessary measure of justice.”
“Wadee was an innocent child,” Ahmed Rehab, Executive Director of CAIR-Chicago, said in a statement. “He was targeted because of who he was — Muslim, Palestinian, and loved.”
One of the boy’s relatives, Mahmoud Yousef, spoke Friday during the sentencing hearing. He thanked the local authorities and Plainfield community for “standing up against the hate crimes,” the Chicago Tribune reported, before turning to face Czuba
“We want to know what made him do this,” Yousef said, according to the Tribune. “What type of news did he hear on the TV or radio that made him do such an unheard [of] crime, that is more than just hate? We are talking about a 6-year-old kid.”
Czuba did not respond to Yousef or speak during the hearing. His attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.
Complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination rose about 70 percent after the war in Gaza began compared with the same period the year before, according to CAIR. Anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2023 also reached their highest number since data collection began in 1991, according to the FBI.