A Palestinian-American boy, 6, was stabbed in horrific October 2023 death and suffered serious injuries to his mother; a US landlord has passed away.
According to the Will County Sheriff’s Office, Joseph Czuba, 73, passed away on Thursday while the Illinois Department of Corrections was in charge of his care, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Saturday. According to the Associated Press news agency, the law enforcement agency did not respond to a request for comment on the death.
One of the earliest and worst hate crime incidents in the US since Israel’s war on Gaza was the boy’s murder, Wadee Alfayoumi, and Hanan Shaheen’s attack on his mother, Hanan Shaheen.
Czuba received a 53-year prison sentence for the attack three months ago. He was found guilty in February of killing Alfayoumi and injuring Shaheen, along with other hate-crimes charges.
Because they were Muslims, Czuba attacked them on October 14, 2023, in response to the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7.
The hate is still present and well, according to Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Chicago office, in a statement released on Saturday.
Shaheen’s terrifying 911 call, as well as bloody crime scene photos and a police video, were the evidence at trial. Before rendering a verdict, jurors had only 90 minutes to deliberate.
When the attack occurred, the family was renting out rooms at Czuba’s Plainfield home, which is 64 kilometers from Chicago.
The boy’s mother, who claimed Czuba attacked her before moving on to her son, insisting that they had to leave because they were Muslims, provided chilling testimony in the prosecution’s case.
In her testimony, Shaheen said, “You, as a Muslim, must die.”
According to Czuba’s ex-wife, Mary, the prosecution heard how angry he had become with Israel’s Gaza war, which has now resulted in the deaths of nearly 60, 000 Palestinians.
According to the police, Czuba allegedly stabbed the boy 26 times using a knife from a belt holder. The judge agreed to turn off the audience, which included Wadee’s relatives, when some of the bloody crime scene photos were so explicit.
In the wake of growing hostility toward Muslims and Palestinians in the US, the case deeply affected the large, well-established Palestinian community in the Chicago area. Authorities in Plainfield have created a park playground in his honor after watching Wadee’s funeral draw large crowds.
Other instances of similarly motivated events in the US include the shooting of two Israeli visitors in Florida and the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian-American girl in Texas, the stabbing of a Palestinian-American man in Texas, and the beating of a Muslim man in New York.
Source: Aljazeera
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