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U.S.|In Hate Crime Trial, Mother of Slain Palestinian American Boy Testifies
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/us/palestinian-boy-stabbing-trial-czuba-al-fayoume.html
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Prosectors argued that the 2023 killing of Wadee Alfayoumi, 6, in suburban Chicago was motivated by anti-Muslim hate.
Feb. 25, 2025, 5:55 p.m. ET
Hanan Shaheen walked to the front of an Illinois courtroom on Tuesday and described how, in a matter of days her landlord turned on her and her 6-year-old son.
For two years, Ms. Shaheen testified, she had no major problems renting two bedrooms for $300 a month, in a plain-looking house along a highway in suburban Chicago. But shortly after Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, Ms. Shaheen said, one of her landlords began speaking hatefully about Muslims and asked her to move out of the home, where he also lived.
“I told him, ‘Pray for peace,’” said Ms. Shaheen, who is Muslim and from Jerusalem.
A few days after that first tense conversation, Ms. Shaheen told jurors, the landlord, Joseph M. Czuba, forced his way into her room and began stabbing her with a knife, leaving her bleeding from the chest, back and head. After she retreated into a bathroom to call 911, she said Mr. Czuba fatally attacked her son, Wadee Alfayoumi, a kindergartner who had just celebrated his birthday. The boy, she said, cried out, “Stop, oh no.”
“I was sitting on the floor talking to the police and I felt like in any second I would die,” Ms. Shaheen said on Tuesday as testimony began in Mr. Czuba’s trial on charges of murder and hate crimes in state court. Mr. Czuba, 73, has pleaded not guilty.
The attack on Ms. Shaheen and the killing of Wadee, who was Palestinian American, drew international attention and left many members of Illinois’s large Palestinian and Muslim communities frightened and angry. Some leaders in those communities connected the attack to rhetoric used by some American politicians and media personalities that they said dehumanized Palestinians.
In court documents, prosecutors described Mr. Czuba as angry, erratic, paranoid and violent. They said he had been listening to radio coverage of the conflict in the Middle East and had become increasingly concerned that he was in personal danger because of his tenants.
