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

Housewife Malka Reich's life has been rocked by the alleged hate crime and terrorist attack that took place partly in her own front yard last month.

The Chicago resident has spent the past year living with the horrors of rising anti-Semitism, but she says, “The trauma of witnessing terrorist attacks on my property was truly horrific,” Reich explained. She believes 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 and reading a cookbook at her Rogers Park home on the morning of Oct. 26 while her baby slept. Her husband had left the house 20 minutes earlier to take the couple's four older children to synagogue when Reich said she “heard the shots,” believed to be the suspect, Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi, who was reportedly killing a 39th man -year-old Orthodox Jewish man who was walking to synagogue on Sabbath morning. Abdallahi is accused of later shooting at police officers and paramedics before being shot and arrested.

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

“I thought maybe he would help,” she explained. But as police gathered in the area where the man had fled, Reich realized she had seen the suspect.

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Reich left her home to see the police because she was concerned whether the victim might have been her father or her husband. The police “didn’t want to tell us anything,” Reich said.

Reich ran home where her baby was still sleeping.

“That’s when I heard the second shot,” she explained. “I ran downstairs, looked at my window and saw my neighbor crouching behind a tree with a dog.”

In now infamous footage from Reich's Ring camera, Reich calls her neighbor and asks him if he would like to come inside. “When he saw me, he saw the suspected shooter. “To be honest, he probably would have been killed if I hadn't said anything,” Reich reported.

As her neighbor ran away, Reich said she “saw the suspect coming out of 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 go.” Get up and shoot my neighbor. Reich said the suspect appeared to be carrying a “clunky” black handgun.

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Police are investigating a shooting on Saturday, October 26, in the West Ridge neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. (Fox32Chicago)

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

Reich explained that the suspect actually returned to her driveway before turning around and walking back to carry out “this suicide attempt 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 a hate crime against a Jewish man in her Chicago neighborhood.

Chicago police did not confirm those details and referred Fox News Digital to their Oct. 31 news conference, in which they declined to provide further facts about the case until they read the full plea to Abdallahi next week. Abdallahi is currently in hospital after being injured in the shootout with police. The department has uncovered details that Abdallahi “planned the shooting and specifically targeted people of the Jewish faith.”

Reich effusively praised the Chicago Police Department's quick response, calling the responding police “super brave” and “supportive of the Jewish community.” She also reported that “the individual police officers I spoke to were thinking [the incident] “was a hate crime,” although Chicago police waited to announce it until there was enough evidence to support that accusation.

There was also trauma from Reich's experience that did not end with the event itself. Because of her proximity to the events, Reich initially spoke to several media outlets about her experiences. She found that her reporting obscured and sometimes confused the details she provided.

She says her life since the shooting has been full of struggles, headaches and insomnia.

“Besides the terrorism coming across the border, it's the cover-up,” Reich said, saying she felt it was coming from both the government and the media. Initial reports of the incident provided limited details as officials declined to provide further details about the nature of the attack. The police initially did not recognize that the victim was Jewish. It took Mayor Brandon Johnson days to acknowledge the religious background of Abdallahi's Jewish victim after completely ignoring it in an initial public statement.

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Reich's own Ring doorbell camera appeared to catch the suspect shouting what some reports claimed was an Arabic phrase. However, Chicago police acknowledged that “something was said by this individual as he exchanged shots with officers,” but has so far refused to confirm what was said despite multiple questions from reporters.

“The statement he made when he attacked our officers is not something that we could present as evidence at this point that would support any motive against his actions toward our officers or toward our victim,” a police official said A press conference was held before hate crime and terrorism charges were filed.

Fox News Digital's conversations with various officials have even been contradictory at times when it comes to whether certain information about the incident could be confirmed, although more details are expected to be released when the full offer is submitted in the coming days.

When police finally announced the hate crime charges, Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling revealed that evidence suggested the suspect “planned the shooting and specifically targeted people of the Jewish faith.”

The officials also did not provide any information about the suspect, Abdallahi. Fox News later confirmed that he was a Mauritanian citizen who entered the United States illegally before being arrested in California in March 2023 and released into the United States

For Reich, the trauma associated with being Jewish in Chicago goes back much further than October 26th. She described how a growing group of activists from Students for Justice in Palestine “would be aggressive toward the Hillel table” when she visited the Illinois Institute of Technology a decade ago.

The October 7 attacks further intensified this feeling of hatred. Given all the anti-Israel activity in the city over the last year, Reich reports that she's “always worried when my husband goes downtown” and that she's “no longer going to Northwestern to walk around the lakefront.”

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“We really changed our lives to avoid it and protect our children from it,” Reich explained.

Although Reich's children attend private schools, she once felt that public school was always an option. Now “it has come to a point where people can no longer send their children to public schools if they are outwardly Jewish,” Reich complained.

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