Hanan Shaheen walked to the front of an Illinois courtroom on Tuesday and described how, in a matter of days her landlord turned on her and her 6-year-old son.
For two years, Ms. Shaheen testified, she had no major problems renting two bedrooms for $300 a month, in a plain-looking house along a highway in suburban Chicago. But shortly after Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, Ms. Shaheen said, one of her landlords began speaking hatefully about Muslims and asked her to move out of the home, where he also lived.
“I told him, ‘Pray for peace,’” said Ms. Shaheen, who is Muslim and from Jerusalem.
A few days after that first tense conversation, Ms. Shaheen told jurors, the landlord, Joseph M. Czuba, forced his way into her room and began stabbing her with a knife, leaving her bleeding from the chest, back and head. After she retreated into a bathroom to call 911, she said Mr. Czuba fatally attacked her son, Wadee Alfayoumi, a kindergartner who had just celebrated his birthday. The boy, she said, cried out, “Stop, oh no.”
“I was sitting on the floor talking to the police and I felt like in any second I would die,” Ms. Shaheen said on Tuesday as testimony began in Mr. Czuba’s trial on charges of murder and hate crimes in state court. Mr. Czuba, 73, has pleaded not guilty.
The attack on Ms. Shaheen and the killing of Wadee, who was Palestinian American, drew international attention and left many members of Illinois’s large Palestinian and Muslim communities frightened and angry. Some leaders in those communities connected the attack to rhetoric used by some American politicians and media personalities that they said dehumanized Palestinians.
In court documents, prosecutors described Mr. Czuba as angry, erratic, paranoid and violent. They said he had been listening to radio coverage of the conflict in the Middle East and had become increasingly concerned that he was in personal danger because of his tenants.
“This happened because this defendant was afraid that a war that started on Oct. 7, 2023 — a half a world away in the Middle East — was going to come to his doorstep,” Michael Fitzgerald, a prosecutor, told jurors. “This happened because Hanan and Wadee were Muslim.”
Mr. Czuba was pushed into the brightly lit courtroom in Joliet, Ill., on Tuesday in a wheelchair and then walked to the defense table. He sat quietly, facing Ms. Shaheen with his back to the standing-room-only court gallery, as she described the attack and identified him as the assailant.
Kylie Blatti, one of Mr. Czuba’s lawyers, asked jurors to remember that “as Joseph Czuba sits here today, he is presumed innocent of every single charge he is facing.”
“In a case like this,” she said, “assumptions cannot be made.”
The Chicago region has a large Palestinian American community, including a suburban area with many Arab restaurants and shops that some refer to as Little Palestine. Wadee and his mother lived in another suburban area, in Plainfield Township, about 40 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, near a Chevrolet dealership and a barbecue restaurant. The home where they lived was adorned at the time of the attack with several American flags and an advertisement for organic honey.
Investigators said that Wadee, a Lego-loving soccer fan whose name has sometimes been transliterated as Wadea Al-Fayoume, was stabbed 26 times and pronounced dead at a hospital. Ms. Shaheen, who was 32 at the time, was stabbed more than a dozen times and hospitalized in serious condition.
In court on Tuesday, Ms. Shaheen spoke in even tones on the witness stand, occasionally asking for a translation from the Arabic interpreter who sat alongside her. She answered questions from prosecutors about photos of her bloodied face that were taken in the hospital, and she described fighting back against Mr. Czuba, at one point wresting the knife from him and stabbing him before he seized the weapon from her.
“I start pushing him back, pulling his hair, and he’s saying, ‘You must die,’” Ms. Shaheen testified. “And then I start looking at my son, he’s scared in the hall.”
When audio of Ms. Shaheen’s call to 911 was played, she was heard telling the dispatcher that she could hear her boy yelling from a nearby room. Then, she said, the screaming stopped.
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