A man from Illinois has been convicted of murders and charges of hate crime in the fatal stabbing of 2023 of a 6-year Palestinian-American child.
Wadoe Alfayoumi was stabbed 26 times and his mother more than a dozen in the attack of October 14, 2023 inside his home in the suburb of Plainfield in Chicago.
Its owner, Joseph Czuba, 73, was accused of multiple positions of murder, as well as attempted murder, aggravated battery and hate crimes. He had declared himself innocent.
The authorities said he attacked his tenants because they were Muslims and in response to the war between Israel and Hamas who had just turned on after Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 against Israel.
A jury from Will County found Czuba guilty of all charges.
The jurors began to deliberate around noon on Friday, before reaching their verdict less than two hours later.
Wadee Alfayouume’s father, Oday al Fayoume, sitting right, and his uncle Mahmoud Yousef attends a vigil for Wadee at the Prairie activity and recreation center in Plainfield, Illinois, on October 17, 2023.
NAM Y. HUH/AP
Wadee’s father, Odai Alfyoumi, thanked those who supported him in comments after the verdict.
“I don’t know if I should be pleased or annoying, if you should cry or laugh,” he said through a translator during a press conference with the Division of American-Islamic Relations of Chicago, the largest Muslim Civil Rights Organization in the United States.
“People tell me to smile. Maybe if I were one of you, I would be smiling. But I am the child’s father and I lost the child,” he said.
He also prayed to “this meaningless loss is the last one we will see, that no child would suffer what my beloved had to happen.”
The executive director of Cair Chicago, Ahmed Rehab, said they are satisfied with the verdict, calling him a “very clear case.”
“This is a case that shook the Muslim community, the Palestinian community and really Chicago and Illinois and La Nación, perhaps even the world in general,” said Reab. “This is one of the worst hate crimes that have been committed in the recent memory who addressed an innocent child of 6 years, a garden of infants and his mother.”
The child’s mother, Hanan Shaheen, was the first to take the position in the trial of a week.
She said that Czuba attacked her first with a knife, stabbing her several times, saying: “Muslim del Diablo, you must die,” as his son observed, according to Chicago ABC station WLSthat was in the courtroom.
She testified that she called 911 from the bathroom when she seemed to leave, but then began to listen to her son screaming, according to WLS.
“I started listening to my son shouting, shouting, shouting: ‘Oh no, hold,” said Shaheen, according to WLS.
Hanan Shaheen, center, and his lawyer Ben Crump, on the left, talk to Alex Perez de ABC, on October 25, 2023.
ABC News
The jury members also listened to the mother’s 911 call from the bathroom, in which it was heard to tell the dispatcher: “He is killing my baby,” Wls said.
They also saw images of the body chamber of the officers who responded to the bloody scene and the knife used in the attack was shown, which an officer said he was still in the child’s body when they arrived. The jurors also heard comments that Czuba made in a vehicle of application of the law after the attack.
“I thought they were going to do Yhad with me,” said Czuba, according to WLS.
In this archive photo of October 30, 2023, Joseph Czuba is before Circuit Judge Dave Carlson for his reading of charges in the Willinois County Court, Illinois in Joliet, Ill.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AP
He also said he was “afraid of my life” and his wife and said that the family was “as infested rats”, according to WLS.
Czuba and his wife rent part of their house in Plainfield with the mother and the son for two years.
His now ex-aspos testified to the prosecutors that Czuba retired in the days after war and wanted the family to move immediately, while she wanted to give them 30 days in advance, according to The Association press.
Czuba did not take the position, renouncing his right to testify.
Their defense lawyers told the jurors at the beginning of the trial that there were holes in the case of the State and urged them to “go beyond emotions to carefully examine the evidence,” according to the AP.
Cheryl Gendron of ABC News contributed to this report.
