Authorities have identified a suspect in the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy workers near a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday night as 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago.
The ContextVideo footage on social media showed a man chanting “free, free Palestine” being led away by officers inside what appeared to be the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday night, following the shooting. Washington Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith told reporters the suspect made the same chant while in custody.
Smith said a man had been seen pacing outside the museum before the incident.
Protests in the United States have remained ongoing following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, which killed some 1,200 people and saw about 250 taken hostage. Israel has resumed its offensive after a temporary ceasefire earlier this year and has so far killed more than 52,000 people in Gaza, both civilians and militants, the Associated Press reported, citing Palestinian health officials.
What To KnowThe Israeli foreign ministry said the victims were Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. “No words can express the depth of our grief and horror at this devastating loss,” it said.
One witness inside the museum told WAGA-TV a man ran into the building after the shooting and was initially offered help.
“The security guard happened to let this guy in. I guess they were thinking, and he was covered in rain, he was clearly in trauma, he was in shock, and some of the people in the event brought him water, they sat him down. ‘Are you OK? Were you shot? What happened?’ He’s like, ‘Somebody call the cops.’
“So about 10 minutes later when the cops actually came in he said, ‘I did this,’ he said, ‘Sir I’m unarmed,’ he put his hands up he grabbed a red kaffiyeh out of his pocket and started the free Palestine chants. You know, ‘there’s only one solution, intifada revolution’ and he was being dragged out of the building as he was yelling ‘free Palestine.'”
Who Is Elias Rodriguez?A LinkedIn profile under the name of a Chicago-based Elias Rodriguez, whose profile photograph appears to match those of the suspect, says he worked as a “profiles administrative specialist” at the American Osteopathic Information Association (AOIA), a body which represents osteopathic medical doctors. The AOIA also lists an “Elias Rodriguez” as an employee in this role on its official website.
According to the LinkedIn page, Rodriguez previously worked as a “production and logistics coordinator and oral history researcher” at the HistoryMakers, a nonprofit that says it is committed to “preserving and making widely accessible the untold personal stories of both well-known and unsung African Americans.”
The HistoryMakers says Rodriguez has a B.A. degree in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago, lived in the city’s Avondale neighborhood and previously worked as a content writer “for commercial and noncommercial firms in the technology space.”
Newsweek has not independently verified that the Elias Rodriguez listed by the HistoryMakers is the same person police arrested over the Washington, D.C. shooting.
Newsweek has contacted Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police, the Chicago Police Department, the AOIA and the HistoryMakers for comment on Thursday outside of regular office hours via telephone, email and online inquiry form.
In October 2017, an article by Liberation, the newspaper of the left-wing Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), listed an “Elias Rodriguez” as one of its activists in an article about the police shooting of 17-year-old Black youth Laquan McDonald in Chicago in 2014. The article appears to have since been removed.
Speaking to the publication, Rodriguez said that “[Amazon’s] whitening of Seattle is structurally racist and a direct danger to all workers who live in that city. So do we in Chicago and all across the country 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 living in deeper and deeper poverty?”
The PSL denied Rodriguez is a party member in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
They added: “We reject any attempt to associate the PSL with the DC shooting.”
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared what he said was the shooter’s 980-word manifesto on his website, though he didn’t say how he obtained the document and its authenticity has not been independently verified.
“I believe the document to be authentic for several reasons, including the fact that it is signed by Rodriguez and timestamped well before he was named by law enforcement or any media,” Klippenstein wrote.
The document advocates for what its author calls “armed demonstration” as a response to “genocide,” a term they use to describe the Israeli military operation in Gaza.
The author writes: “Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they’ll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they’re doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright.”
Referring to Operation Protective Edge, a 2014 Israeli military operation against Hamas in Gaza, the author added: “The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine.
“But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”
What People Are SayingSpeaking to the BBC, Washington, D.C.-based Rabbi Levi Shemtov described the couple shot as “nice people, popular,” adding this is “brutal news.”
The Israeli Embassy to the U.S.A. said in a statement: “Yaron and Sarah were our friends and colleagues. They were in the prime of their lives.
“This evening, a terrorist shot and killed them as they exited an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in DC.
“The entire embassy staff is heartbroken and devastated by their murder. No words can express the depth of our grief and horror at this devastating loss.”
President Donald Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social website: “These horrible D.C. killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!” (Newsweek)