Chicago Jewish mother speaks out against response to alleged hate crime: 'Terrorism on my property'

Stay-at-home mother Malka Reich’s life has been unsettled by the alleged hate crime and terror attack that partially took place in her own front yard last month.

The Chicago resident has spent the past year living with the horrors of rising antisemitism, Reich says "the trauma of witnessing terrorism on my property was really horrible." She believes that officials "are trying to hide" key facts of the attack, which she described to Fox News Digital.

The mother of five said she was resting in her Rogers Park home, reading a cookbook while her baby napped on the morning of Oct. 26. Her husband had left the home 20 minutes earlier to take the couple’s four older children to synagogue when Reich said she "heard the gunshots," which were believed to be suspect Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi allegedly shooting a 39-year-old Orthodox Jewish man walking to synagogue on the morning of the Sabbath. Abdallahi is accused of later firing at police officers and paramedics before being shot and apprehended.

Reich recalled looking out the window and seeing someone running in a safety vest. 

"I thought maybe he was going to help," she explained. But when police began to assemble in the area the man had fled, Reich realized that she had seen the suspect.

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The victim, described by the Jewish United Fund as a "Jewish community member," reportedly was shot in the shoulder in Chicago. (Fox32 Chicago)

Reich left her house to find the police, concerned about whether the victim might have been her father or her husband. The police "wouldn’t tell us anything," Reich said. 

Reich ran back home where her baby still slept. 

"That’s when I heard the second round of shooting," she explained. "I ran downstairs, looked at my window and saw my neighbor crouching behind a tree with a dog." 

In now infamous footage captured by Reich’s Ring camera, Reich calls to her neighbor, asking him if he wants to come inside. "When he saw me, he saw the alleged shooter. He probably would have been killed, honestly, if I hadn’t said something," Reich reported.

While her neighbor ran away, Reich said that she "saw the suspect come out of the shadows of my driveway. I was so close to him, I could have smelled him if it wasn’t for the glass between us. I saw him go up and shoot at my neighbor." Reich said the suspect appeared to carry a "chunky" black handgun. 

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Police investigate a shooting on Saturday, Oct. 26 in the West Ridge neighborhood of Chicago, Ill. (Fox32 Chicago)

"At that point," Reich said, "I thought he was coming back for me," noting the "loud-and-proud Israeli-American flag" hanging outside her home. 

Reich explained that the suspect did come back into her driveway before turning and going back to make "this suicide push for the police."

Meanwhile, Reich barricaded herself in her baby’s room with a knife. She stayed there until a neighbor called to tell her the suspect had been caught.

Malka Reich witnessed part of a hate crime against a Jewish man in her neighborhood in Chicago.

The Chicago Police Department did not corroborate these details, pointing Fox News Digital to their Oct. 31 press conference in which they declined to give additional facts of the case until they read the full proffer to Abdallahi next week. Abdallahi is currently hospitalized after being wounded in the shootout with police. The department has found details that Abdallahi "planned the shooting and specifically targeted people of the Jewish faith."

Reich was effusive in her praise of the Chicago Police Department’s rapid response, calling the responding police "super brave" and "supportive of the Jewish community." She also reported that "the individual police I talked to did think [the incident] was a hate crime," though the Chicago PD waited until it had ample evidence to support this charge before announcing it.

There has also been trauma from Reich’s experience that did not end with the event itself. Given her closeness to the events, Reich initially spoke with multiple media entities about her experience. She found that their coverage obfuscated and sometimes confused the details she relayed.

She says that since the shooting, her life has been filled with struggles, headaches and sleeplessness.

"Besides the terrorism that’s coming over the border, it’s the cover-up," Reich said, saying that she feels this came from both 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. Police at first did not acknowledge that the victim was Jewish. Mayor Brandon Johnson took days to acknowledge the religious background of Abdallahi’s Jewish victim, after an initial public statement that ignored it completely.

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Reich's own Ring doorbell camera appeared to catch the suspect shouting something that some reports have claimed was an Arabic phrase, but while Chicago Police acknowledged "there was something stated from that individual while he was exchanging gunfire with officers," they have so far refused to confirm what was said despite several questions from reporters.

"The statement that was made while he was engaging our officers is nothing that we could bring in as evidence at this point that would support any motive against his actions towards our officers or towards our victim," one police official said at a news conference that took place before hate crime and terrorism charges were filed.

Fox News Digital's conversations with different officials even conflicted at times, when it came to whether certain information about the incident could be confirmed, although more details are expected to be made public when the full proffer is filed in the coming days.

When police finally announced the hate crime charge, Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling revealed that evidence indicated that the suspect "planned the shooting and specifically targeted people of the Jewish faith." 

Officials also did not provide much information about the suspect Abdallahi. Fox News later confirmed that he is a Mauritanian national who entered the U.S. illegally before being apprehended in California in March 2023 and released into the U.S.

The trauma associated with being Jewish in Chicago goes back far longer than Oct. 26 for Reich, who described how a growing contingent of activists with Students for Justice in Palestine would "be aggressive to the Hillel table" when she attended Illinois Institute of Technology over a decade ago. 

The attacks of Oct. 7 heightened that feeling of hate even further. With all the anti-Israel activity in the city over the past year, Reich reports that she is "always worried if my husband goes downtown," and that she doesn’t "go to Northwestern anymore, to walk around their lakefront area."

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"We’ve really changed our lives around this to try to avoid it and shield our children from it," explained Reich. 

Though Reich’s children attend private schools, she once felt that public school was always a backup option. Now, "it has come to a point where people cannot send their children to public schools if they are outwardly Jewish," Reich lamented.

Fox News' Ronn Blitzer, Sarah Rumpf-Whitten, Greg Norman, Adam Shaw, Bill Melugin and Griff Jenkins contributed to this report.