Odai Alfayoumi kept a straight face as he reentered the Will County Courthouse in Joliet on the final day of the trial against his son’s killer.
An hour later, Alfayoumi sat motionless in the front row of the courtroom as the jury declared Joseph Czuba guilty of murdering Alfayoumi’s 6-year-old son, Wadee, in an October 2023 knife attack that prompted a national discussion of a spike in Islamophobic behavior during the war between Israel and Hamas.
Following the verdict, Alfayoumi said through a translator that he wasn’t sure if he “should be pleased or upset, if (he) should be crying or laughing.”
For many, Friday’s verdict brought a measure of closure and justice in a case that put the nation on notice about possible backlash toward Palestinians and Muslims as the war between Israel and Hamas raged. But advocates, family members and elected officials all said there was more to be done to protect against future hate crimes. Antisemitism and Islamophobia both spiked in the face of the war, currently subject to a fragile truce that officials are negotiating to extend.
Prosecutors said Czuba, now 73, attacked Wadee and his mother, Hanan Shaheen, after he became increasingly hostile toward his Palestinian and Muslim tenants in the first days of the war between Israel and Hamas. On Oct. 14, 2023, he stabbed Wadee 26 times and tried to stab and strangle Shaheen, referring to the pair as “infested rats” shortly after he was arrested.
Czuba was convicted Friday of murdering Wadee, attempted murder of the boy’s mother, two counts of aggravated battery and two counts of committing a hate crime. He showed no apparent emotion as Judge Amy Bertani-Tomzack read the verdict. Czuba, who is set to be sentenced on May 2, could face life in prison without parole.
The slaying inspired vigils and activism as close by as Plainfield, the village closest to where the stabbings took place, and reverberated from the southwest suburbs to Washington, D.C.
Then-President Joe Biden named the boy in an address to the nation weeks after the war broke out, saying he was “a proud American” and urging the nation not to “stand by and stand silent when this happens.” Members of Illinois’ congressional delegation, backed by Muslim civic advocates, spearheaded resolutions asserting that the U.S. has “zero tolerance for hate crimes, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab discrimination.” Shaheen later testified at a congressional hearing on hate crimes and met with Biden in the final days of his presidency.
Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of CAIR-Chicago, a Muslim civil liberties and advocacy group, hailed the verdict as welcome, expected punctuation to “a very clear-cut case … one of the worst hate crimes that have been committed in recent memory.”
But, he continued, Czuba became prejudiced against Wadee and his mother after listening to media coverage of the war that dehumanized and sowed fear about Palestinians and Muslims. He called on elected officials, the news media and civic leaders to “talk responsibly” about world conflicts and to remember the human tolls that inflammatory rhetoric can take.
“We remember (Wadee) as an angel that has left us, that is now in heaven with his Lord,” Rehab said. “And we tell ourselves, we can do better.”
‘Speak up’
Cyndi Glass thinks about Wadee every time she puts her son on his school bus.
“I can see (Shaheen) walking Wadee out, in her robe,” said Glass, 47. “I think about the fact that he’s not on the bus and he should be.”
Glass’ son had been close friends with Wadee in their kindergarten class, she said, and she’d immediately feared the worst when she saw police tape on their block on Oct. 14.
Much of her last year and a half was spent helping to organize ways to remember Wadee and explain to her son and his classmates what happened. She attended the trial in a kaffiyeh, a black and white kerchief that can be a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. She was confident the jurors would convict Czuba of murder, but said her biggest fear had been that they would not find him guilty of a hate crime.
“I was like, ‘This needs to be a hate crime more than anything,’” she said.
Glass wants to see others in Plainfield and around Will County “speak up when they see things happening that are wrong, that are hateful” and make efforts to spend time with others who aren’t like them. Failure to do so, she said, “is affecting our little community.”
Glass spoke of her hope to see “something good come out of this” at a vigil shortly after the stabbings. That vigil was organized in part by Mohammed Faheem, who has since helped establish the Plainfield Community Alliance.
“A lot of people came (to the vigil) and said, ‘We need to continue doing something to keep awareness going and build bridges,’” said Faheem, 69.
He described the idea of the alliance, which will run a kindness-themed essay, art and poetry contest later this year, as “to make sure neighbors get to know each other.”
Feelings of terror
Yasmeen Elagha was at home with her family, “doomscrolling” as the first week of the Israel-Hamas war drew to a close when she first heard the news of Wadee’s death.
“Terror was the feeling that overtook me from inside,” she said. “I felt like everything that I was seeing happen to my family could actually happen to me here in the U.S.”
For Elgaha, who last year accused the U.S. State Department of denying her family equal protection under the Constitution on behalf of her Palestinian American cousins whose lives were upended by the fighting, the verdict showed “there is room” to advocate for Palestinian Americans and others who were the targets of hate crimes.
“I hope this moves the needle forward seeking justice for victims not for any other reason other than they were a person who was harmed,” she said.
Amina Barhumi, the advocacy and policy lead at the Muslim Civic Coalition, cautioned that hate crimes among Muslims are underreported and said that the verdict, “while welcome, does not dismantle the systems that allow this hate to fester.”
She nodded to the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which began Friday night, and said the holiday offered a chance to reflect and to grieve, but also an opportunity to take action: “to ensure that Wadee is the last.”
As people filtered in and out of the courthouse in the afternoon, Glass, whose son was school friends with Wadee, said goodbye to the boy’s father, uncle and cousin and pulled her shawl tighter around her. She was going to go home and give her son a big squeeze.
“I’m just going to tell him I love him and that something good happened in the world,” she said.
