On Sunday, US police charged a 71-year-old suburban Chicago man with a hate crime for fatally stabbing a 6-year-old boy and extremely wounding a 32-year-old woman, alleging he singled out both victims because of their Islamic faith and as a response to the battle between Israel and Hamas.
In a statement posted on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, the Will County Sheriff’s Office said, “Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis.”
Officers saw both victims late on Saturday morning at a home in an unincorporated place of Plainfield Township, approximately 40 miles (65 kilometers) southwest of Chicago.
The boy, who was pronounced dead at the hospital, was stabbed 26 times with a large military-style knife, according to an autopsy Sunday, the sheriff’s office said.
The woman had more than a dozen stab wounds on her body. She stayed hospitalized Sunday but was expected to survive.
Police said that the man, Joseph Czuba, suspected of the offense was found Saturday outside “sitting upright outside on the ground near the driveway of the residence” with a cut on his forehead.
He was in custody on Sunday and awaiting a court appearance. Police charged him with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, two counts of hate crimes, and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
Authorities did not disclose the names of the victims, but the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations arranged a Sunday news conference with a family member and identified the victims as Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Palestinian-American boy who had recently turned 6, and his mother Hanaan Shahin.
According to the organization, they had lived on the ground floor of the house for two years, adding the suspect was their landlord. Quoting text messages from the mother to the boy’s father, the suspect reportedly yelled, “You Muslims must die!” ahead of the stabbing, according to CAIR-Chicago.
The Muslim civil liberties organization named the crime “our worst nightmare,” and part of an alarming spike in hatred calls and emails since the eruption of violence in the Middle East.
