Who is Elias Rodriguez? A Portrait of Jewish Museum Shooting Suspect Emerges
The Chicago man charged with killing two Israeli embassy staffers has been a vocal advocate for Palestinian issues and a staunch critic of corporations.
CHICAGO—The 31-year-old Chicago man who allegedly shot and killed two young Israeli Embassy staffers Wednesday night is an activist who has vocally protested on behalf of pro-Palestinian issues and a range of progressive and anticorporate causes.
Elias Rodriguez once demonstrated with a socialist group outside the home of then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel against the city’s bid for a new Amazon headquarters, and to mark the anniversary of a fatal police shooting of a Black teenager. Some of his anger had roots in his boyhood, dating to his father’s apparent deployment to Iraq.
According to authorities, Rodriguez’s path took a deadly and twisted turn Wednesday night. Just after 9 p.m. outside the Capital Jewish Museum in downtown Washington, he allegedly shot two people around his own age: Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, and her partner, Yaron Lischinsky, 30.
“I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” he told police, according to an FBI criminal complaint made public late Thursday.
Investigators are probing Rodriguez’s past for clues into his motivation, including a possible manifesto. “The FBI is aware of certain writings allegedly authored by the suspect, and we hope to have updates as to the authenticity very soon,” Deputy Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Dan Bongino posted Thursday.
Outwardly, Rodriguez didn’t appear to be someone on the edge. He was a young professional in a city teeming with them. He had a degree in English from the University of Illinois Chicago, and lived with a woman in an apartment in a working-class area of the city. He was employed, working as an administrative specialist at the American Osteopathic Information Association. Authorities said he was in Washington this week to attend a job-related conference, and that he legally purchased and flew with the 9mm handgun used in the killings.
But beneath this life appeared to be an emerging radicalization, with roots as early as his childhood.
He was 11 years old when his father, an Army National Guardsman, sat the family down to tell them that he was being sent to Iraq, according to a 2017 GoFundMe post created on his behalf. It was raising money to send Rodriguez to the People’s Congress of Resistance, a gathering in Washington that aimed to “confront the Congress of the millionaires,” according to the group’s online preamble.
In the post, Rodriguez expressed his anger at the conflict in Iraq that had left “hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead in their wake,” and he accused Democrats of “lying” and not fulfilling a campaign promise to end the war. “It’s up to the people to protect themselves.”
Shortly after the fundraising appeal, he protested outside the home of then-mayor Emanuel, a Democrat, over a variety of hot-button issues. A few years earlier, 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was fatally shot by a Chicago police officer. The city was also making efforts to attract a second headquarters for Amazon.
Addressing the crowd, on behalf of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, he asked if they wanted “a nation of cities dominated and occupied by massive corporations where only the rich and white can live,” while “the vast majority of us must live on edges of the city and society living in deeper and deeper poverty?”
After his speech, the crowd broke into chants of approval for his message, according to an account in Liberation, the group’s newspaper.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation posted on X Thursday that Rodriguez’s “brief association” with the group ended in 2017. “We know of no contact with him in over seven years,” the group said. “We have nothing to do with this shooting and do not support it.”
Emanuel addressed the shooting in a statement: “It’s getting very old, trite, and far too frequent to say there’s no space for violence after every violent political act,” he said. “If we want to be honest with ourselves, we will need to have a hard conversation with some difficult questions at the core about why, why now, and why these people.”
For part of Thursday, yellow police tape blocked the entrance to Rodriguez’s four-story, brick apartment building in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood. FBI agents searched the premises and spoke to neighbors.
The neighborhood, where Emanuel lived growing up, was at one time heavily Jewish. It is now a mixture of races and religions, with Latinos and Hispanics representing the largest demographic group.
In the window of Rodriguez’s apartment is a picture of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian-American who was stabbed to death by his landlord in a Chicago suburb in 2023, according to John Wayne Fry, 71, who lives on the same floor.“He was always friendly. On the outside of his door, there’s a ‘Hello Kitty’ sign,” Fry said. “He seemed like a normal, friendly guy.”
Fry said he had never spoken to Rodriguez about the Middle East. “I regret that,” he said. “I wish that I had an opportunity to talk with him because if I had I would have talked him out of it.”
Nora Burke, a 46-year-old massage therapist who lives across the street from Rodriguez, said she saw heavy police activity in the area as she was leaving for a morning yoga class.
“It’s terrible,” she said. “Nobody wants to think their neighbor is a murderer.”
Write to John McCormick at mccormick.john@wsj.com, Jack Gillum at jack.gillum@wsj.com and Joe Barrett at Joseph.Barrett@wsj.com
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