A man who targeted a 6-year-old boy and his mother for being Muslims brutally attacked them with a military-style knife, killing the boy and wounding the mother at a residence outside Chicago on Saturday, the authorities said.
The boy, who was stabbed 26 times with a serrated knife with a seven-inch blade, was pronounced dead at a hospital, according to the Will County Sheriff’s Office in Joliet, Ill.
The boy’s mother, 32, was in serious condition with more than a dozen stab wounds, officials said. She was expected to survive. The authorities did not publicly identify the victims.
“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” the Sheriff’s Office said.
The assault on Saturday comes amid mounting deadly attacks between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls the Gaza Strip. On Oct. 7, Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel, prompting intense Israeli retaliation. There have been street demonstrations in New York and around the United States by pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters.
The man accused in the attack, Joseph M. Czuba, 71, was the landlord of the home the family was renting, the Sheriff’s Office said. He has been charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, two counts of a hate crime and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon in what the Sheriff’s Office described as a “senseless and cowardly act of violence.”
On Sunday, the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, denounced the stabbing and called it “our worst nightmare.”
“Our hearts are heavy, and our prayers are with the darling boy and his mother,” Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of CAIR-Chicago, said in a statement.
Mr. Rehab added, “We have full confidence in the authorities to investigate this heinous incident as a hate crime and to do so swiftly.”
CAIR, citing text messages the boy’s mother sent to his father from the hospital that were shared with the advocacy group, said the landlord had been angry with what he was seeing on the news.
According to the text messages, the landlord knocked on the door, and when the mother opened it he tried to choke her and attacked her with a knife, yelling, “You Muslims must die!”
When she ran into the bathroom to call 911, the text messages say, she came out to find that he had stabbed her son.
“It all happened in seconds,” she texted, according to CAIR.
When deputies arrived before noon at the residence in Plainfield Township, which is about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, they found Mr. Czuba “sitting upright outside on the ground” by the driveway of the residence, the Sheriff’s Office said.
He “did not make any statements to detectives regarding his involvement in this heinous attack,” the office said.
Mr. Czuba, who had a cut to his forehead, was taken to a hospital and later taken to the Will County Sheriff’s Office Public Safety Complex for questioning.
At a news conference on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Rehab said that he ultimately blamed the assailant but added that the “lopsided” coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict created an atmosphere that made an attack like this one more likely.
“It wasn’t until he started watching the news and hearing the statements that something had changed,” Mr. Rehab said. “The family had no reason to suspect what would occur.”
State Representative Abdelnasser Rashid, a Democrat, said the onus was on elected officials to do more.
“Let’s be clear: This was directly connected to dehumanizing of Palestinians that has been allowed over the last week by our media and by elected officials who lacked a moral compass and courage to call for something as simple as de-escalation, as peace,” he said.
Rebecca Carballo contributed reporting.