Stay-at-home mother Malka Reich's life has been precarious due to the alleged hate crime and terrorist attack that occurred partly in her front yard last month.
Reich, a Chicago resident, has spent the past year living with the horrors of rising anti-Semitism. “The trauma of witnessing terrorism on my property was truly horrific,” Reich says. She believes officials are “trying to hide” the key facts of the attack, which she described to Fox News Digital.
The mother of five said she was resting at her Rogers Park home, reading a cookbook while her child napped on the morning of Oct. 26. Her husband had left the house 20 minutes earlier to take the couple's four older children to synagogue when Reich said “I heard gunshots.” The suspect, Sidi Mohamed Abdallah, is believed to have shot a 39-year-old Orthodox Jewish man who was walking to the synagogue on Saturday morning. . Abdullah is accused of later shooting at police officers and paramedics before being shot and arrested.
Reich remembers looking out the window and seeing someone running in a safety vest.
“I thought maybe it would help,” she explained. But when police began to converge on the area where the man fled, Reich realized she had seen the suspect.
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Reich left her home to find the police, concerned about whether the victim was her father or husband. Police “didn't tell us anything,” Reich said.
Reich ran back into the house where her child was still asleep.
She explained: “Then I heard the sound of the second round of shooting.” “I ran downstairs and looked out my window and saw my neighbor sitting behind a tree with his dog.”
In the infamous footage captured by Reich's Ring camera, Reich calls her neighbor, asking if he wants to come in. “When he saw me, he saw the alleged shooter. He probably would have been killed, frankly, if I hadn't said anything,” Reich said.
As her neighbor was running away, Reich said she “saw the suspect emerge from the shadows of my driveway. I was so close to him, I could have smelled him if it weren't for the glass between us. I saw him leave.” Get up and shoot my neighbor.” Reich said the suspect appeared to be carrying a “large” black handgun.
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“At that point, I thought he was going to come back for me,” Reich said, referring to the “high and proud Israeli-American flag” hanging outside her home.
Reich explained that the suspect returned to her driveway before turning around and returning to make “this suicidal push to the police.”
Meanwhile, Reich barricaded herself in her child's room with a knife. She remained there until a neighbor called her to tell her that the suspect had been arrested.
The Chicago Police Department has not confirmed these details, with Fox News Digital citing their October 31 press conference in which they declined to provide additional facts about the case until they read Abdullah's full presentation next week. Abdullah is currently hospitalized after being injured in an exchange of gunfire with the police. The ministry found details that Abdullah “planned the shooting and specifically targeted followers of the Jewish faith.”
Reich had high praise for the Chicago Police Department's quick response, describing the responding police as “extremely courageous” and “supportive of the Jewish community.” She also stated that “the police I spoke to believed (the incident) was a hate crime,” although Chicago police waited until they had enough evidence to support that charge before announcing it.
There was also trauma from Reich's experience that did not end with the event itself. Due to her proximity to the events, Reich initially spoke to several media outlets about her experience. I found their coverage to be vague and sometimes confusing the details I reported.
Since the shooting, she says, her life has been filled with conflict, headaches and insomnia.
“Along with the terrorism that comes across the border, there is the cover-up,” Reich said, saying she felt this came from the government and the media. Initial reports of the incident were limited in details, as officials refused to confirm much about the nature of the attack. The police did not initially acknowledge that the victim was Jewish. It took Mayor Brandon Johnson several days to acknowledge the religious background of Abdullah's Jewish victim, after an initial public statement that completely ignored him.
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Reich's Ring doorbell camera appears to have captured the suspect shouting something that some reports claimed was an Arabic phrase, but while Chicago police have acknowledged that “there was something that individual said during the exchange of gunfire with the officers,” they have so far declined to confirm What was said despite several questions from journalists.
“The statement he made while speaking to our officers is not something we can present as evidence at this point that would support any plea against his actions toward our officers or toward our victim,” a police official said at a news conference. It occurred before the hate crime and terrorism charges were brought.
Fox News Digital's conversations with various officials have even clashed at times, when it comes to whether certain information about the incident can be confirmed, though more details are expected to be announced when the full presentation is given in the coming days.
When police finally announced the hate crime charge, Chicago Police Director Larry Snelling revealed that evidence suggested the suspect “planned the shooting and specifically targeted followers of the Jewish faith.”
Officials also did not provide much information about the suspect, Abdullah. Fox News later confirmed that he was a Mauritanian national who entered the United States illegally before being arrested in California in March 2023 and released in the United States.
The trauma associated with being Jewish in Chicago goes back much longer than October 26 for Reich, who described how a growing group of activists with Students for Justice in Palestine would be “hostile toward the Hillel table” when she attended the Illinois Institute of Technology during the decade before Time.
The attacks of October 7 intensified this feeling of hatred even more. With all the anti-Israel activity in the city over the past year, Reich says she “always worries if my husband goes downtown,” and she “no longer goes to Northwestern to walk around the lakefront.”
“We've actually changed our lives around this to try to avoid it and protect our children from it,” Reich explained.
Although Reich's children attend private schools, she once felt that public schools were always a fallback option. Now, “it's gotten to the point where people can't send their kids to public schools if they're ostensibly Jewish,” Reich lamented.
Fox News' Ron Blitzer, Sarah Rumpf-Whitten, Greg Norman, Adam Shaw, Bill Melogen and Griff Jenkins contributed to this report.
Original article source: Jewish mother in Chicago speaks out against response to alleged hate crime: 'Terrorism on my property'
