Landlord Sentenced in Hate Crime Killing of 6-Year-Old

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." (More hate crimes stories.)