Political signs lined the windows of the Chicago home of Elias Rodriguez, the man officials believe killed two Israeli embassy aides at a Jewish event in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
One declared that the apartment was a “Proud Union Home” while another read “Justice for Wadea,” the 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy who was killed in a Chicago suburb in 2023.
A third sign read “Tikkun Olam means FREE PALESTINE.” Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase meaning “repair the world” that has come to reflect a shorthand for social justice.
The signs add striking details to the portrait of the suspect that is coming into focus the day after the shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum that killed Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. Rodriguez’s past activism and online presence, as well as a manifesto thought to have been written by him, all point to a young man driven by long-standing far-left beliefs.
D.C. police identified Rodriguez, 31, of Chicago as the suspected shooter at a press conference Wednesday night. He implied to officers at the scene that he was responsible for the murders, according to police.
Video from the scene shows the alleged shooter in handcuffs, shouting “Free Palestine” as he is taken away by police. And an eyewitness told Jewish Insider that after the shooting, the suspect started screaming, “I did it, I did it. Free Palestine. I did it for Gaza.” His charging documents contain similar details.
That motivation matches a manifesto signed by an Elias Rodriguez and posted on X about an hour after the shooting, before authorities had named a suspect. The 900-word manifesto makes the case for the “morality of armed demonstration” and was accompanied by a caption exhorting readers to “Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home.”
The manifesto’s writer said he had first become “acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine” during the 2014 Gaza war.
Then, the manifesto said, “I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane,” but things had changed.
“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,” the manifesto said.
The X account that posted the document has also frequently posted about the war in Gaza, including posts from January 2024 with the words “De@th 2 Amerikkka” and “Happy New Year, Death To Israel.”
In October 2024, it posted, “Progressive tweeps, as much as I love delving into the day’s Discourse™️, can we PLEASE save the idealistic and high-minded debate over the morality of sending a truck bomb into the offices of The New York Times until *AFTER* we send a truck bomb into the offi.”
In September 2024, the account posted an image of a headline about Israel sending troops into Lebanon along with the emojis “🔪🐷🇮🇱.”
In November 2023, the account reposted an image of a protest hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization that has played a leading role in protesting the war in Gaza.
JVP condemned the shooting in a post on X Thursday morning. “We condemn last night’s fatal shooting of two staff of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C,” the group wrote. “We are grounded first and foremost in the belief that all human life is precious, which is precisely why we are struggling for a world in which all people can live in safety and dignity.”
The online presence of Rodriguez appears to link him to the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s Chicago chapter, a socialist party that says it takes a revolutionary stance.
A 2017 article in the party’s publication, Liberation Magazine, quoted Rodriguez as railing against a proposed Amazon headquarters in Chicago. The article was taken down after the D.C. shooting.
“[Amazon’s] whitening of Seattle is structurally racist and a direct danger to all workers who live in that city,” said Rodriguez in the article. “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?”
In the article, he is pictured outside of former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house protesting for justice for Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager who was killed by a police officer in 2014.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation rejected the association of Rodriguez with their party in a post on X, but acknowledged that he was affiliated with them in 2017:
“We reject any attempt to associate the PSL with the DC shooting. Elias Rodriguez is not a member of the PSL. He had a brief association with one branch of the PSL that ended in 2017. We know of no contact with him in over 7 years. We have nothing to do with this shooting and do not support it.”
Rodriguez worked in an administrative role at the American Osteopathic Information Association. The organization put out a statement following his arrest, writing that they were “shocked and saddened to learn that an AOIA employee has been arrested as a suspect in this horrific crime.”
Prior to working there, a Linkedin page shows he worked for The HistoryMakers, a Chicago nonprofit that documents African-American history.
Rodriguez’s profile on the organization’s website was removed. But a profile belonging to an Elias Rodriguez on the HistoryMakers website found on the Wayback Machine shows he was an oral history researcher for the organization and received a B.A. degree in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
His profile on the site said he “enjoys reading and writing fiction, live music, film, and exploring new places.”
In 2017, Answer Chicago posted a fundraiser for Rodriguez to attend the People’s Congress of Resistance in Washington D.C. In the GoFundMe page, he wrote about his father, who was an Army National Guardsman, being sent to Iraq.
With Chicago Cubs paraphernalia behind him, Rodriguez wrote, “I don’t want to see another generation of Americans coming home from genocidal imperialist wars with trophies.”
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