After killings, suspected gunman sat with guests at D.C. Jewish museum
As authorities investigate the stunning act of violence, which left a young couple dead and sent shock waves nationally and internationally, a picture began to emerge of the man accused of pulling the trigger.
Moments after a burst of gunfire was heard outside the Capital Jewish Museum in downtown Washington on Wednesday night, a breathless man in a blue suit rushed into the building.
Paige Siegel, a 30-year-old attorney and supporter of Israel who was attending a networking event at the facility, watched security let him in with several other people. She sat on a bench near the young man with the neatly trimmed beard and asked if he was okay, believing him to be seeking refuge from the unfolding violence. A friend of hers brought him a cup of water.
As the minutes ticked by, Siegel told The Washington Post in an interview, a dark thought popped into her head: “What if he did it?”
But she pushed it aside. The man appeared shaken up and kept muttering about calling the police, she said. She took him to be a “normal person that you walk by on the street.” She asked if he knew where he was and told him he was in a Jewish museum.
Suddenly, she recalled, he stood up.
“He starts screaming, ‘I did it. I did it for Gaza,’” she said. Then he shouted, “Free Palestine.”
As authorities investigate the stunning act of violence, which left a young couple dead and sent shock waves nationally and internationally, a picture began to emerge of the man accused of pulling the trigger. Elias Rodriguez, a 31-year-old Chicago resident who was charged Thursday with two counts of first-degree murder and murder of foreign officials, had an English degree, a history of activism and based on social media accounts that appear to be his, a growing sense of outrage over the war in Gaza.
The son of an Illinois National Guard sergeant who was deployed to Iraq during the Iraq War, Rodriguez appears to have been previously affiliated with Marxist-Leninist groups. He worked for the American Osteopathic Information Association, helping verify physicians’ information for a database. A search of Illinois court records revealed no prior criminal history.
Investigators on Thursday were reviewing a missive posted on social media about an hour after the shootings by an X account appearing to belong to the accused gunman, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation. As of midday, they had not publicly confirmed that the document was written by the suspect in custody for the shootings of Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, who worked in the Israeli Embassy in Washington and were a couple. Friends say Lischinsky had recently bought a ring and planned to ask Milgrim to marry him.
The document, titled “Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home,” accuses Israel of “genocide” and says “a perpetrator” may be a good person at times, “and yet be a monster all the same.” The message concludes, “I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia …” and “Free Palestine.”
That same X account had posted “Death to Israel” earlier in the year. A Goodreads account that appeared to be linked to Rodriguez reviewed books aboutrace, class, colonialism and Chicago politics.
Reached by phone on Thursday, several people who appeared to be related to Rodriguez declined interview requests. No one answered the door at several addresses linked to relatives of Rodriguez on the South Side of Chicago.
FBI agents on Thursday were seen going in and out of a redbrick apartment where Rodriguez lived on a leafy, quiet block in the East Albany Park neighborhood. The middle-class enclave tucked into the city’s northwest side is home to a diverse mix of residents, including Mexican and Middle Eastern families. In the window of a unit where Rodriguez is believed to live hung a faded sign that read “Justice for Wadea” – an apparent reference to the 2023 murder of Wadea Alfayoumi, a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy in Illinois who was stabbed to death by his landlord in 2023. A neighbor, John Wayne Fry, identified the unit as belonging to Rodriguez.
Fry sounded astonished that the seemingly quiet and friendly man he recognized from the hallways, who had a “Hello Kitty” sign outside his apartment, was suspected in the shootings. As he walked back from a corner grocery store toward the apartment building where he said the suspected shooter lived next door, his voice grew emotional at times.
“It’s like, what would cause a decent human being to do something crazy? What causes this?” said Fry, 71. “Because it shocked me when I heard the shooter was from Chicago. But to have it be my next door neighbor?”
Rodriguez was born and raised in Chicago and obtained an English degree from the University of Illinois Chicago, according to a now-deleted profile on the website of a nonprofit, HistoryMakers, where he appears to have worked before 2024. The group could not be reached for comment Thursday. A person whose name and year of birth matched that of Rodriguez attended the University of Illinois Chicago from fall 2016 to spring 2018, earning a bachelor of arts in English, university spokesman Brian Flood said.
At one point, Rodriguez was affiliated with the far-left Party for Socialism and Liberation, though the group distanced itself from him after his arrest, saying he is not a member and had only “a brief association with one branch of the PSL that ended in 2017.” The group has organized protests in support of the Palestinian cause.
“We know of no contact with him in over 7 years,” it said in a post on X. “We have nothing to do with this shooting and do not support it.”
A 2017 article in Liberation, a newspaper associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, said an Elias Rodriguez who belonged to the group gave a speech at a protest over the police shooting of Laquan McDonald in Chicago.
The demonstration, held outside then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house, also targeted the city’s bid to host Amazon’s headquarters.
The article, which appeared to have been deleted Thursday, quoted Rodriguez as asking whether Americans want “a nation of cities dominated and occupied by massive corporations where only the rich and white can live and the vast majority of us must live on edges of the city and society.”
A GoFundMe from 2017, organized to send an Elias Rodriguez from Chicago to the People’s Congress of Resistance in D.C., quoted Rodriguez as saying that he was 11 years old when his dad “sat our family down to tell us that he was being sent to Iraq.” The page, which included his photo, said he wanted to “put a final end to imperialist war.” A man whose name appears to match that of Rodriguez’s father, Eric Anthony Rodriguez, served as a sergeant in the Illinois National Guard and was deployed to Iraq for about a year beginning in October 2006, the Illinois National Guard said.
Fry, the neighbor, said he never talked politics with Rodriguez – something he now regrets. He said he would have tried to talk him out of any violent acts.
“As you can see, I’m an old man,” he said. “I learned during the Vietnam War you don’t stop war with guns and bombs; you stop wars by talking with your neighbors.”
A law enforcement officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an open investigation, told The Post that Rodriguez had traveled Tuesday to D.C. to attend work meetings. He flew from Chicago O’Hare International Airport to Reagan National Airport on United, an arrest affidavit says. He declared a gun, which was tucked into his checked luggage, the affidavit says.
The American Osteopathic Information Association had a board meeting and a second gathering involving federal health programs scheduled in the nation’s capital on Wednesday. Those events took place as planned, according to a person familiar with organization. Later that day, according to the arrest affidavit, Rodriguez purchased a ticket to the event at the Capital Jewish Museum.
Hours later, around 9 p.m., D.C. police received the first reports of gunfire.
Bellware reported from Chicago. Joseph Menn, Emily Davies, Tom Jackman and Mark Berman contributed to this report.
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