Robert Crimo III and Joseph Czuba became infamous around the world in recent years for their heinous crimes. Now, Crimo’s guilty plea and Czuba’s conviction have made news, even hundreds of miles away from the suburbs where they carried out their deadly attacks.
Chicago area residents, and especially the survivors and relatives of those who were killed, can now breath a sigh of relief that Crimo and Czuba have been held accountable and will likely be locked up for the remainder of their lives when they are sentenced in the spring.
Crimo on Monday decided not to stand trial and instead pleaded guilty to killing seven people and injuring 48 others in a shooting rampage during a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park three years ago.
Eight months earlier, Crimo had agreed to accept responsibility, but he changed his mind at the last minute, toying with the emotions of victims’ families who had filled the courtroom that day ready to hear him plead guilty to 69 counts of murder and attempted murder.
Crimo’s surprise plea this week spared them and the jury from listening to agonizing details of the massacre.
Meanwhile, the jurors selected for Czuba’s trial, conversely, had to sit and endure hearing the gory details about how the 73-year-old Plainfield landlord attacked his tenant, Hanan Shaheen, with a ScubaPro knife before unleashing his bigoted rage on her child, Wadee Al Fayoumi, killing him.
The Will County jury didn’t take too long — a little over an hour — to convict Czuba of murder, attempted murder, aggravated battery and a hate crime for lashing out at the Palestinian American mother and son just a week after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
“You Muslim must die,” Shaheen testified Czuba told her as he wielded the knife. Czuba later relayed to police that he feared for his life and thought the pair, including 6-year-old Wadee, were “going to do jihad on me.” He also likened the two to rodents.
The sickening and vile actions of Crimo and Czuba are hard for many people to comprehend. Yet, sadly, there’s a likelihood others will commit murder too, when the sparks of easily accessible weapons and normalized hatred of others are lit.
There will be some sense of closure once these two are sentenced. But as a society, to truly put these horrors behind us, we must do more against gun violence and hatred and take active steps to defeat both.
The reality is, Crimo and Czuba either had help or were in environments that emboldened them to lash out.
It was Crimo’s father, Robert Crimo Jr., who signed the Firearm Owner’s Identification card application for his troubled son to apply for gun ownership.
Czuba attacked Wadee and his mother after tuning in to conservative talk radio following the Oct. 7 attack.
And in September — less than a year after Czuba stabbed Wadee 26 times — no Republican senator offered condolences to Shaheen or expressed any objection to the increase of anti-Muslim and ant-Palestinian hate crimes during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
“Leaders who behave this way give a wink and nod to constituents with those same prejudiced views, telling them it’s OK,” this editorial board said at the time.
After the Highland Park mass shooting, we also noted that the “conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court and too many members of Congress think it is gun violence that has unalienable rights, not the rest of us.”
Like raising a child, it does take a village to create change.
Everyone, included our local elected leaders, must do their part more than ever to keep our communities safe.
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