US man who was sentenced to 53 years of murdering a Palestinian American child

The death of the six-year-old Wade Alfayoumi, a Palestinian American, has illuminated a light in cases of anti-Arab hatred.

A man from the United States was sentenced to 53 years in prison for the fatal first first of a six -year -old Palestinian American boy after he was guilty for hate crimes and murder.

Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak announced the judgment on Friday in the case of the 73-year-old landlord Joseph Czuba in Illinois.

On October 14, 2023, just a few days after the start of the Israel war in Gaza, Czuba attacked two of his tenants, Hanan Shaheen and her little son Wade Wade Alfayoumi.

The police say that Czuba is angry with the war and drove its way into it. He strangled Shaheen and held her before taking out a military knife.

Shaheen suffered more than a dozen stab wounds before fled to a bathroom to call 911 for help. Alfayoumi has now been stabbed 26 times. He did not survive.

In Czuba's process, Audio from Shaheen's panicked 911 call and the mother's testimony were contained. When she spoke from the witness stand in English and Arabic, she described that Czuba became increasingly paranoid and Islamophobic during the war.

Almost two years before the attack, the family had rented two bedrooms in Czuba's house in Plainville, Illinois, just outside of Chicago.

But after the war started on October 7, Shaheen remembered Czuba that she asked her to take off her accommodations because the Muslims were not welcome.

Then, during the attack, she heard again how he quoted her Muslim faith. “He told me that they had to die as a Muslim,” said Shaheen.

The incident was one of the best profiled files of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arabic and anti-Muslim violence in the United States after the GAZA's outbreak.

However, the supporters say that it is part of a trend of the anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic hate that has swept the country in recent months.

After the attack, the police found that Czuba was sitting on the floor outside the house, his hands and body bloody. Czuba did not think about it, and his defense team tried to clear his conviction because the public prosecutor's office played the feelings of the jury.

Some of the pictures of the crime scene were so graphic that the judge was turned away from the audience's television screens. The members of the jury heard how Shaheen 911 operators said for fear: “The landlord kills me and my baby!”

During his opening statements, Michael Fitzgerald, the deputy prosecutor for Will County, Alfayoumi's last moments described as full of horror.

“He couldn't escape,” said Fitzgerald. “If it wasn't enough that this defendant killed this little boy, he left the knife in the little boy's body.”

In February, the jury took less than 90 minutes to return a culprit.

On Friday, Richter Bertani-Tomczak refused to defend the condemnation. When she announced the sentence, she called Czuba's actions “brutal” and “hideous”.

She said that a 30-year sentence had been sentenced for Alfayoumi's murder and for another 20 years for the attack on his mother and three years for inspection of a hate crime.

Alfayoumi's Großonkel, Mahmoud Yousef, was the only family member who spoke at the hearing of the conviction. He said that no time in prison could ever compensate for the loss that his family suffered.

He also explained that Alfayoumi Czuba saw as a grandfather figure, and he asked which “fake news” could have led to such violence through the war in Gaza.

“Some people bring this war to this country,” said Yousef. “We can't. We cannot bring the war here. We cannot bring hatred to this country.”

In March, the Council for American Islamic relationships published a report in which it received 8,658 complaints about anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents last year, which increases an increase of 7.6 percent.

It was the highest balance that the group had recorded since collecting data in 1996.