UPDATE
Jul 26, 2025 3:39 PM CDT
A landlord who was just beginning to serve a 53-year prison sentence for the hate crime attack on a Palestinian American boy and his mother in suburban Chicago has died, Illinois authorities said Saturday. Joseph Czuba, 73, died in state custody on Thursday, NBC News reports. He'd been sentenced in May after being convicted of fatally stabbing 6-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi and wounding his mother, Hanan Shaheen. In a statement on Saturday, per the AP, Ahmed Rehab of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Chicago office said, "This depraved killer has died, but the hate is still alive and well."
May 2, 2025 2:16 PM CDT
An Illinois landlord who killed a 6-year-old Muslim boy and severely injured the boy's mother in a vicious hate crime attack days after the Israel-Hamas war began was sentenced Friday to 53 years in prison. Joseph Czuba, 73, was found guilty in February of murder, attempted murder, and hate crime charges in the stabbing death of Wadee Alfayoumi and the wounding of his mother, Hanan Shaheen. Czuba targeted them in October 2023 because of their Islamic faith and as a reaction to the war between Israel and Hamas, the AP reports. The family was renting rooms from Czuba in a suburban Chicago house at the time of the attack.
Czuba stabbed Wadee 26 times. He declined to speak during the sentencing hearing, per NBC News, and did not appear to have any relatives in the courtroom. Wadee's grandfather Mahmoud Yousef told reporters outside court Friday that any sentence would pale in comparison to the family's loss. "It doesn't matter what the numbers are," he said, per USA Today. "He took a life from us. He took a future." President Biden denounced the attack the next day and marked the one-year anniversary of the Palestinian American boy's death last October. The Senate passed a resolution honoring Wadee in September that said the US "has zero tolerance for hate crimes, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab discrimination."
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