A Niles man who pleaded guilty to defacing multiple signs and property at Northwestern University in Evanston with swastikas and other Nazi hate symbols in January has been sentenced to seven years in prison, according to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
Shahid Hussain, 43, of the 6000 block of West Keeney Street, pleaded guilty to two counts of a hate crime and one count of institutional vandalism, per the state’s attorney’s office.
If this had been Hussain’s first offense, those would be Class 3 felonies subject to a sentence normally between two and five years in prison, per Illinois statute. However, the fact that Hussain had been sentenced for a previous offense in 2022 raised the seriousness of his new charges to Class 2 felonies, subject to a sentence of three to seven years, with an option to extend to up to 14 years, according to Illinois statute.
In 2022, Hussain received a three-year prison sentence for hate crimes targeted at multiple Jewish establishments.
“Acts of hate and intimidation have no place in our communities,” State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke wrote in a statement.
“This guilty plea and prison sentence demonstrate that we will hold individuals accountable for crimes intended to intimidate and spread hate in our communities.”
Prosecutors allege Hussain was caught on the university’s surveillance cameras Jan. 30, entering the campus to draw various swastikas, a symbol co-opted by the Nazi Party before and during the World War II years, and other Nazi emblems across university signs and buildings, according to a state’s attorney’s news release on Hussain’s sentencing.
Video footage also depicts Hussain raising his arm in a Nazi salute, per the state’s attorney’s office.
Northwestern police officers identified Hussain from the surveillance video footage and from “previous incidents at the university,” the news release detailed.
Evanston police Cmdr. Chelsea Brown told Pioneer Press that an officer recognized Hussain while on patrol near Davis Street and Benson Avenue and took him into custody Feb. 12, before turning him over to Northwestern’s police, who were handling the investigation.
At the time of his arrest, Hussain admitted to defacing Northwestern’s property with Nazi symbols, according to the state’s attorney’s office press release.
In 2022, Hussain was sentenced to three years in the Illinois Department of Corrections for institutional vandalism and a hate crime against a Jewish day school, multiple synagogues and a kosher bakery, per the state’s attorney’s office.
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Representatives from Northwestern University did not respond to a Pioneer Press request for comment on Hussain’s conviction.
Hussain was handed the seven-year prison sentence Sept. 24 by Cook County Judge Paul Pavlus at the Skokie Courthouse, 5600 Old Orchard Road.
Earlier instances of hate crimes targeted at the elite Evanston-based institution date back to 2016, when two students, Anthony Morales, 19, and Matthew Kafker, 18, were charged in connection with spray-painting racist and homophobic messages, along with “phallic drawings and the word ‘Trump’ inside a campus chapel,” across the university’s campus, per previous baiduhai reporting.
Officials called for an end to “repugnant symbols of hate and intolerance” in 2019, following findings that a rope that had been fashioned into a noose and left outside of the university’s Henry Crown Sports Pavilion in March of that year.
A later incident, posted to social media, displayed a sticker reading “It’s Okay to Be White,” a slogan adopted by many neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, inside the university’s Allison Dining Hall, according to a statement issued by the university in April 2019.
“Acts of hate, whether premeditated or not, will not go unchallenged at Northwestern University,” officials wrote in regards to the 2019 incidents.
“Those who choose to be a part of the Northwestern community are expected to abide by a code of conduct that does not tolerate such acts.”