Elizabeth Wolf, 42, has been charged with attempted capital murder for attacking a 3-year-old boy in a swimming pool in Texas.
A woman in Texas, US, has been indicted by a grand jury for the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian-American girl earlier this year, which police say was motivated by racial hatred.
The suspect, identified as Elizabeth Wolf, 42, was indicted by a Tarrant County grand jury in an indictment returned last month that included a hate crime enhancement, according to court records released Tuesday.
Wolf, whose representative could not immediately be reached for comment, was charged with attempted capital murder of a person under 10 years old and intentionally causing bodily injury to a child. The hate crime element of the charge may increase the severity of Wolf's sentence if she is convicted.
According to a police report, the May attack occurred in the pool of an apartment complex in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Euless.
At that point, the suspect approached the 3-year-old girl's mother, who was also in the pool with her 6-year-old son, and asked her where they were from. The suspect then attempted to drown the 3-year-old girl and also attempted to grab the 6-year-old boy, according to the police report.
The mother was able to pull her daughter from the water, police said, and local medics responded to the scene and the children were released.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Texas) said earlier this year that the defendants approached the children’s mother “with racist questioning” and then grabbed the children, who were in the shallow end of the pool, and pulled them into the deep end in the alleged drowning attempt.
Human rights advocates have warned of increasing threats against Palestinian Americans, Muslims, Arabs and Jews since the start of Israel's war in Gaza.
In late November, three Palestinian men in their 20s were shot near a college campus in Vermont, United States, and all three were injured.
A month earlier, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death in Illinois. Police charged a 71-year-old man with murder and a hate crime for stabbing the boy to death and seriously injuring his mother.
According to police, the elderly attacker targeted the victims in response to the war in Gaza and their religion.
