A US court sentenced Joseph Czuba to 53 years in prison on Friday for killing a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy and brutally injuring his mother in a gruesome hate crime, days after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, news agency Associated Press reported.
In February 2025, the court convicted the 73-year-old of attempted murder and hate-crime offenses after he murdered young Wadee Alfayoumi and attacked his mother, Hanan Shaheen.
Court Ruling and Sentencing
Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak ordered Czuba to serve 30 years in prison for the murder of the boy and an additional 20 years consecutively for attacking Shaheen. The judge also ordered him to serve three years imprisonment for hate crimes.
The sentence length guarantees that he will not survive his time in prison, which essentially makes it a death sentence.
The Motive Behind the Crime
Evidence presented during the trial indicated that Czuba assaulted the young Muslim boy and his mother due to their Islamic religion, which he felt was threatening him because of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The Alfayoumi family had been renting rooms in the house of Joseph Czuba in Plainfield, Illinois, some 64 kilometers from Chicago where the attack took place.
Testimony from Victim’s Mother
The mother of the boy testified and stated that Czuba had attacked her and turned his attention to her son after insisting that the family leave his house because they were Muslim.
“He told me ‘You, as a Muslim, must die,’” said Shaheen, during her testimony at the trial.
Czuba’s ex-wife, whom he divorced after the incident, also said that her former husband had gotten especially upset over the war between Israel and Hamas.
Details of the Attack
Police testified at trial that Czuba had drawn a knife from a holder on a belt and stabbed the boy 26 times, leaving the knife in the child’s body.
They also said that they found Czuba outside the house with blood on his hands and body, following a frantic 911 call from the mother.
