Joseph Czuba Died in Prison After a Jury Convicted Him of Murdering 6-Year-Old Palestinian American Wadee Alfayoumi

Joseph Czuba did not live long enough to serve the sentence a Will County jury built for him. On May 2, 2025, Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak gave the 73-year-old Plainfield Township landlord 53 years for murdering 6-year-old Palestinian American Wadee Alfayoumi and for trying to murder the boy’s mother, Hanan Shaheen, inside the rooms the family rented from him. On July 24, 2025, Czuba died at Menard Correctional Center. The public account from authorities was natural causes. His lawyer had already told the court he had stage 4 cancer and had been treated in the prison hospital. A full autopsy narrative was not released.

The story is why a man who had rented to a Palestinian American family for two quiet years picked up a military-style knife on October 14, 2023, eight days after Israel began the assault on Gaza that followed the Hamas attacks of October 7, and used it on a kindergartner. Wadee had been born in the United States on October 6, 2017, to Odai Alfayoumi and Hanan Shaheen. He was six years and eight days old.

A war carried into a rented kitchen

Israel’s campaign did not stay a response to October 7. It became a grinding assault on a civilian population sealed inside Gaza, a campaign that United Nations investigators, rights groups, and a lengthening list of governments have described as genocide. Czuba did not board a plane. He imported the permission structure. American cable news and conservative talk radio spent those days treating Palestinian life as a category error, something that could be discussed as a threat rather than as neighbors who pay rent.

The day before the stabbing, his wife later told jurors, he talked about a “national day of jihad,” withdrew $1,000 in case “the grid” went down, and soaked in the panic. Around 11:30 a.m. on October 14 he knocked on Shaheen’s door angry about events in Jerusalem. She testified that he throttled her, yelled that Muslims must die, and came at her with the knife after she said they should give peace a chance. She scratched his face, ran for the bathroom, and called 911. She found her son with the blade still in his body. Wadee was stabbed 26 times. Shaheen was stabbed more than a dozen times. She needed stitches in her face and staples in the back of her head. First responders found a blade about seven inches long. Czuba was outside, cut, and done.

The Chicago Sun-Times later reported that prosecutors tied the paranoia to commentary he had been hearing on conservative talk radio as Israel’s war intensified. The Intercept and The New York Times covered the verdict as a hate-crime case. It is also a case about what happens when political speech treats Palestinians as people who can be killed at scale and a landlord decides the child down the hall counts as the same enemy.

Ninety minutes, then 53 years

The trial ran February 24 through 28, 2025. Jurors heard the 911 call, Shaheen, Czuba’s former wife Mary Connor, and the firefighters and medics who walked into the apartment. Czuba waived his right to testify. The jury was out less than 90 minutes. It convicted him of first-degree murder, attempted murder, two counts of aggravated battery, and two hate-crime counts. Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow called it “a wicked act of hatred which has ravaged a family and shocked the community.”

At sentencing the judge stacked 30 years for the murder, to be served at 100 percent, 20 years for the attempted murder of Shaheen, and 3 years for the hate crime, with credit for 566 days already served. She could have imposed life. She did not. Czuba, thin in a red jail uniform, said nothing. No relatives sat behind him. His lawyer had already put the cancer on the record, which is another way of saying the court was sentencing a man unlikely to outlive the term. Wadee’s great-uncle, Mahmoud Yousef, told the court the boy’s father had plans that died with him, then looked at Czuba and said he had no right to take them. Outside, Yousef added the sentence this case keeps trying to outrun: some people are bringing this war into this country, and they cannot do that.

Wadee’s father, Odai Alfayoume, who was divorced from Shaheen and was not in the house that morning, told reporters he still could not square the man who had once called the boy an angel with the man who, prosecutors said, called him a devil Muslim. A grandfather addressed the court because the father was too shaken to speak, and asked the only question that matters once the verdict is in. One stab was not enough. When Czuba was on top of the child, what did he think he was doing?

What Springfield and Washington were willing to say

Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland opened a federal hate-crime investigation within a day of the killing. The FBI opened its own track. Those files never became a separate federal trial that overtook the state case. They did mark the killing as the kind of attack Washington will name when the victim is already dead and the perpetrator is an old man in a suburb, rather than an ally with an air force.

Illinois was faster than Congress. On April 30, 2025, the state Senate adopted Senate Resolution 265, sponsored by Sen. Ram Villivalam and a line of colleagues, declaring September 21, 2025, Wadee Day in Illinois, lined up with the International Day of Peace. The resolution mourns a boy it describes as carrying Palestinian heritage, history, and love, and it says plainly that he was slain by hate. On November 19, 2025, Sen. Dick Durbin, with Sen. Tammy Duckworth, introduced Senate Resolution 506 to honor Wadee as a child murdered for his Palestinian Muslim identity. That resolution recites the 26 wounds, the words “All Muslims must die,” and the media diet of dehumanizing anti-Palestinian rhetoric. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee. Referral is not passage, and a condolence in committee does not interrupt a weapons pipeline.

Plainfield had already put his name on a playground. A memorial was unveiled on June 28, 2025. Earlier vigils gathered at a basketball court because the boy loved the game. Joe Biden said he was shocked and sickened and that the family had come to America seeking the refuge everyone else claims. Shaheen later sat with him to talk about the spike in attacks on Muslims and Palestinians. A condolence is not a ceasefire. It is not a change in the bombs that kept falling on Gaza while Illinois picked a jury.

A street sign, a death in custody, and a war that did not pause

The name traveled farther than the sentence. In June 2026 the Illinois Senate passed House Joint Resolution 46, designating Harlem Avenue from 79th Street to 111th Street as Little Palestine Way through Bridgeview, Burbank, Chicago Ridge, Palos Hills, and Worth. State Reps. Lisa Davis and Mike Crawford and Senate President Don Harmon pushed it. On July 11, 2026, Bridgeview dedicated that stretch and also dedicated a portion of 87th Street as Wadea Al-Fayoumi Way, using the spelling local organizers put on the sign. Sabha Abour, who helped lead the honorary designation, said children should be able to see the name and feel pride in who they are. The sign does not put a boy back in a classroom. It does refuse the idea that his name belongs only in a crime blotter.

Ahmed Rehab of CAIR-Chicago did not treat Czuba’s death as closure. “This depraved killer has died, but the hate is still alive and well,” he said, and he pointed at the children killed in Gaza whose killers, unlike Czuba, are shielded by U.S. policy and by a press corps that still struggles to say the word genocide. Thousands had packed Wadee’s funeral. Civil rights monitors logged a surge in anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian attacks in the United States after October 2023. This case produced a murder conviction. Most of the others produced a police report and a news cycle.

What a hate-crime verdict cannot touch

Odai Alfayoume filed a wrongful-death suit in November 2023 against Czuba, his wife, and their management company. Shaheen filed her own civil case in June 2024 and named Czuba’s brother as well, alleging he had steered the family into the rental despite knowing the landlord’s tendencies. Connor filed for divorce in December 2023. Civil court is where families go when a criminal sentence cannot return a child who liked Legos and soccer. Those dockets do not reach the government that armed the war Czuba cited as his cue.

A 53-year judgment against a dying landlord does not touch Israel’s genocide in Gaza or the American weapons that sustain it. The AEGIS Alliance has kept that supply line in the same frame as this kitchen: Israeli gunfire at a U.S.-linked aid site, orders pushing humanitarian groups out, tactics in Lebanon compared to the genocide in Gaza, and the killing of Saleem Al-Ashqar. Wadee was murdered in Illinois because a landlord decided “your people” were fair game. Those people are still being killed with weapons this country supplies. Czuba is dead. The supply line is not. A street sign in Bridgeview says the boy’s name out loud. It is not enough.