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

Joseph Czuba did not survive 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 attempting to murder the boy’s mother, Hanan Shaheen, inside their rented rooms on October 14, 2023. On July 24, 2025, Czuba died at Menard Correctional Center. The Randolph County coroner listed natural causes. His lawyer said he had stage 4 cancer. He had been in the prison hospital. There was no autopsy.

The short time behind bars is not the story that should close this file. The story is why a man who had rented to a Palestinian American family for two quiet years picked up a military-style knife eight days after Israel launched its assault on Gaza and used it on a kindergartner 26 times.

A War Dragged Into a Kitchen

Israel’s campaign on Gaza began after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Within days that campaign became a grinding assault on a trapped civilian population that rights groups, United Nations investigators, and a growing list of governments have described as genocide. Czuba did not travel to Gaza. He imported the talking points.

The day before the stabbing, his wife later said, he talked about a “national day of jihad,” pulled $1,000 from a bank in case “the grid” went down, and steeped himself in the panic American cable news was selling as analysis. On October 14, around 11:30 a.m., 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 him, ran to 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, took 19 stitches in her face and staples in the back of her head, and described her son watching the first part of the attack before Czuba turned the knife on him. First responders found a blade about seven inches long. Czuba was outside with a cut on his face.

The Intercept and The New York Times covered the February 2025 verdict as a hate-crime case. It is also a case about what happens when American political speech treats Palestinian life as disposable and a landlord decides the tenant down the hall counts as the enemy.

Ninety Minutes in the Jury Room

The trial ran February 24 through 28, 2025. Jurors heard the 911 call. They heard Shaheen. They heard Czuba’s former wife, Mary Connor. They heard firefighters and medics. 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, 20 for the attempted murder of Shaheen, and 3 for the hate crime, minus 566 days already served. Czuba, thin in a red jail uniform, said nothing. No relatives sat behind him. 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 he added the sentence this case keeps trying to outrun: “Some people are bringing this war into this country; you can’t do that.”

The Federal File, the Civil File, and a Park With His Name

Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland opened a federal hate-crime investigation within a day of the killing. The FBI announced its own track. Those files did not produce a separate federal trial that overtook the state case. They did mark the killing as the kind of attack Washington is willing to 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.

Odai Alfayoume, the boy’s father, who was divorced from Shaheen and not in the house that morning, 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 rental despite knowing the landlord’s tendencies. Connor filed for divorce that December. The civil docket is where families go when a criminal sentence cannot put a child back in a classroom.

Plainfield named a playground for Wadee. On June 28, 2025, a memorial was unveiled. Earlier vigils at a local basketball court, because the boy loved the game, drew Dilawar Syed speaking for the Biden White House and a father who called his son an “All-American boy” who was always smiling. Joe Biden said he was shocked and sickened and that the family had come to America for the same refuge everyone else claims. A condolence is not a ceasefire. It is not a change in the weapons pipeline that kept Gaza’s death count climbing while Illinois picked a jury.

The Death in Custody and the Hate That Did Not Die With Him

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 then pointed at the children killed in Gaza whose killers, unlike Czuba, are shielded by U.S. policy and a press corps that still struggles to say the word genocide. Thousands had already packed Wadee’s funeral. Shaheen later sat with Biden to talk about the spike in Islamophobia. Civil rights monitors logged a surge in anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian attacks in the United States after October 2023. Wadee’s case is the one that produced a murder conviction. Most of the others produced a police report and a news cycle.

What a Hate-Crime Verdict Cannot Do

A 53-year judgment against a dying landlord does not touch the government that armed the war Czuba cited as his cue. It does not restore a child who liked Legos and soccer. It does tell American juries that stabbing a Palestinian six-year-old after a news cycle about Gaza is a crime this country will, at least once, name out loud.

The AEGIS Alliance will keep the names in the same frame, as it has in coverage of Israeli gunfire at a U.S.-linked aid site in Gaza and of Israel’s orders pushing aid groups out of the territory. Wadee Alfayoumi was killed in Illinois because a landlord decided “your people” were fair game. The people he meant are still being killed, at industrial scale, with American inventory. Czuba is dead. The inventory is not.