An Illinois man has been charged with stabbing a 6-year-old boy to death and seriously injuring his mother because they are Muslim.
Will County Sheriff’s deputies and Plainfield Police officers responded to the desperate 911 call Saturday morning from the 32-year-old woman, who said she ran to the bathroom when her landlord stabbed her and the boy, WLS reported.
The officers found the suspect, 71-year-old Joseph Czuba, outside on the ground near the home’s driveway. He had a cut on his forehead and was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Inside, they found the woman and boy in a bedroom, both with several dozen stab wounds to their chests, torsos, and arms. They were rushed to a hospital, where the boy — stabbed 26 times — was pronounced dead. The woman was hospitalized in serious condition but is expected to survive.
Police said they found a knife on the scene and arrested Czuba after he was treated and released for the cut on his head.
“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” the sheriff’s department said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Investigators did not say if the boy and the woman were related, but the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Chicago) said the woman was the boy’s mother.
CAIR-Chicago identified the mother as Hanaan Shahin and her son as Wadea Al-Fayoume. The organization said they’d lived in the house for two years with no issues with the landlord. According to text messages sent from her hospital room to the boy’s father, Shahin said that Czuba had been angry about what he was seeing on the news. He knocked on her door Saturday morning, and when she answered, he tried to choke her, and then attacked with a knife, shouting, “You Muslims must die!”
Shahin ran into the bathroom to call 911, and when she came out, she found that Czuba had stabbed Wadea to death. “It all happened in seconds,” she wrote.
He has been charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, two hate crime counts, and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
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[Featured image: Joseph Czuba/Will County Sheriff’s Department]
