The mother of Wadea Al-Fayoume, the 6-year-old Palestinian-American who was stabbed to death in a Chicago suburb this weekend, posted about the attack on Facebook just hours after it took place on Saturday.
Hanaan Shaheen, Wadea’s 32-year-old mother, was stabbed 12 times during the attack, local authorities in Plainfield, Chicago, said. The family’s landlord, 71-year-old Joseph Czuba, has since been arrested in connection with the stabbings, with police saying Czuba was likely motivated by “the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” and the Muslim faith of the family, according to a statement from the Will County Sheriff’s Office.
Despite being in critical condition at the time of the attack, Wadea’s mother appears to have taken to Facebook that same afternoon to share her son’s last words.
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“My son’s last words were: (I’m fine). May God have mercy on him and let him dwell in the highest paradise.”
The Daily Beast first reported on Wadea’s final words Sunday, after interviewing Oday El-Fayoume, the child’s father and Shaheen’s ex-husband. Oday told The Daily Beast the family had gotten along well with the landlord, who lives on the top floor of their home, ahead of the attack—and he’d even built the child a treehouse before his death.
“He is an angel. Basically a small angel in the form of a person. To this minute, I cannot believe how this could have happened,” the father told The Daily Beast on Sunday. “It is hard to picture this man holding a knife about to stab my son. I keep thinking that my son was probably running towards him before getting stabbed, trying to give him a hug.”
The head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Ahmed Rehab, said that the suspect had yelled out “You Muslims must die,” while attacking Shaheen, according to a conversation he had with the mother, who is still recovering in the hospital in the aftermath of the attack. Police reported that the attack was carried out with a military knife that had been recovered from the scene of the crime.
Other posts on Shaheen’s Facebook page include videos of the Palestinian mother and her son, including on his birthday on Oct. 6, just 10 days before his brutal killing. The video shows Wadea with his mother playing in a bedroom, as the 6-year-old blows kisses toward the camera. In other videos, the mom-and-son duo are playing outside together, doing workouts and running around a playground.
The little boy is set to be buried in Plainfield, Illinois, on Monday. Nazmi Hannon, a close family friend who described the father as a “brother” to him, spoke to The Daily Beast from the site of a funeral service on Monday.
“I just remember all the little things. How he smiled, how he played, how he ran around,” 28-year-old Namzi, also a Palestinian-American, told The Daily Beast. “He was running around playing just last week, and now he’s in a casket.”
He said that when the Israel-Hamas conflict first began, some in the local Palestinian and Muslim community had been “afraid” that it would spur attacks and threats against them. But the murder of Wadea has inspired them to “stand together.”
“We will not retaliate. We hope nothing like this happens to another child. No Palestinian, no Jewish child. No family should go through this kind of pain,” he said, adding “this will not stand in this community.”
Others spoke during a press conference outside the boy’s funeral, pleading for no more violence on American soil.
“You want war? It’s overseas,” said a man identified only as Wadea’s uncle. “It’s not our war. It’s not the United States’ war.”
Dr. Omar Suleiman, the founder of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, insisted that “we can not ignore the greater environment of hate that has been enabled by every single structure around us right now.”
“There’s more than just the man that stabbed a 6-year-old boy here,” he said. “I want you to think about what was in his head. What type of hate has to be manufactured in the head of a man for him to stand over a 6-year-old boy and stab him 26 times.”
In a statement on Sunday, President Joe Biden called the crime “a horrific act of hate” that “has no place in America, and stands against our fundamental values: freedom from fear for how we pray, what we believe, and who we are.”
Czuba has been charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, hate crimes, and aggravated battery. The U.S. Justice Department has also launched a federal hate crime investigation into the stabbing attacks.
