Officials said they considered the attack, outside of Chicago, a hate crime, tied to the fighting in Israel and Gaza.
A Chicago-area landlord was arrested and charged with murder and hate crimes after authorities said he stabbed and killed a 6-year-old boy and seriously wounded his mother, allegedly because the tenants are Muslim.
Joseph M. Czuba, 71, was charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, two counts of a hate crime and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, the Will County, Illinois, Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. The US Justice Department has also opened a federal hate crime investigation into the attack, US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Sunday.
The sheriff’s office said Czuba did not make a statement to detectives but investigators determined the victims were “targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis.”
