A Will County jury has indicated it has reached a verdict in the hate crime trial of Plainfield landlord accused of attacking his Palestinian American tenant and killing her 6-year-old son, Wadee Al Fayoumi.
Lawyers have been summoned to the courtroom to hear the verdict.
Joesph Czuba, 73, is charged with attacking Hanan Shaheen and her son in October 2023, after becoming radicalized by coverage of the war in Gaza.
Prosecutors began their closing argument Friday by replaying the video from the back of a police squad car, where Czuba states, “They are just like infested rats.”
“He thinks they’re rats,” Will County Assistant State Attorney Christopher Koch told the jurors. “What do you do when you have an infested rat situation? You exterminate, and that’s what he did on that day.”
Shaheen testified that on the morning of Oct. 14, 2023, Czuba stabbed her throughout her body while yelling; “You Muslim must die.”
Shaheen said she was able to lock herself in a bathroom and call 911 but while inside she began to hear her son screaming.
In a 911 call re-played for jurors Friday, Shaheen yells out; “He is killing my baby.”
Officers testified they found Wadee naked, lying on a bed. He had been stabbed 26 times.
After the attack, Czuba tells a sheriff’s police sergeant that he feared for his life and thought “they were going to do jihad on me.”
Czuba was found at the scene of the attack covered in blood and had a holster for a ScubaPro knife attached to his side — the same kind of knife used to stab Wadee, according to sheriff’s deputies and crime scene investigators.
Czuba pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder, two counts of aggravated battery and two counts of committing a hate crime.
Czuba’s defense attorney, George Lenard, argued Friday that the case exemplifies a “rush to judgment,” and that police failed to conduct a proper investigation.
“How is it you can sign guilty verdicts when all this evidence was not tested?” Lenard asked during his closing argument Friday.
Lenard called on the jury not to jump to conclusions and instructed them to discuss the ways women generally respond when their child is in harm; “talk to the moms … there is something about women.”
He went on to critique Shaheen’s testimony, saying she refused to look him in the eye while speaking through an Arabic translator, and questioned the nature of her injuries.
Assistant State’s Attorney Christine Vukmir told jurors that Lenard was “beating around the bush,” but “what he is trying to say is that Hanan killed her son. That’s what he wants you to believe.”
Vukmir called Lenard’s implication “ridiculous” and asked jurors not to “consider outlandish theories.”
“What [Lenard] wants you to ignore is that we have a dead kindergartner on our hands,” Vukmir said. “A kindergartner, not even 4 feet tall and this is how he died,” she said while holding the 7-inch blade in front of the jurors.
“This is what plunged into his body 26 times.”