The man who killed two Israeli embassy staff members outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, on Wednesday night has been an active member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a far-left, Marxist, pro-Palestine group.
Chicago native Elias Rodriguez, 30, held a red keffiyeh and shouted, “Free, free Palestine,” as he was being taken into custody after shooting Sarah Lynn Milgrim and her fiancé, Yaron Lischinsky.
According to a witness report, Rodriguez came into the museum looking visibly shaken.
"We thought that he was just in the street ... and maybe [he] came into the building because he wanted to be somewhere safe,” Katie Kalisher told NBC. She had attended an event at the Jewish museum to listen to a panel on humanitarian aid in Gaza.
Kalisher said that she and several others tried to calm him down by talking to him. When he asked which museum they were inside of, she informed him it was the Jewish museum. Referencing the shots heard, he then asked Kalisher, "Do you think that's why they did it?"
She said that she was sure that it was unrelated.
“He pulls out his keffiyeh and he says, ‘I did it. I did it for Gaza. Free, free Palestine,’” Kalisher told NBC.
Rodriguez Criticizes Amazon for Racism and Inequality in Seattle
Rodriguez has a BA in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago. He worked as an oral history researcher at The HistoryMakers Digital Archive and most recently as a profiles administration specialist at the American Osteopathic Information Association.
Rodriguez made a political donation to the Joe Biden campaign in 2020.
In 2017, Rodriguez attended a protest in honor of the anniversary of the death of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old boy who was fatally shot by a Chicago police officer.
“The wealth that Amazon has brought to Seattle has not been shared with its Black residents,” Rodriguez told Liberation magazine at the time.
The company’s “whitening of Seattle is structurally racist and a direct danger to all workers who live in that city,” he said. “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?”
On Thursday, PSL posted an “anti-genocide pledge” on social media. The same group, however, released a statement following the attack saying it rejects "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."
Nevertheless, in a picture from April 2025, a person resembling Rodriguez appears to participate in PSL-Chicago’s “Socialist Reconstruction Study Group” at the Restoried Bookshop in Chicago.
Additionally, according to open source intelligence, an X profile has surfaced (@kyodo.leather) that seems to belong to Rodriguez. One X user calls @kyodo.leather “Elias. The account started to actively publish on X in October 2023, just two weeks after October 7, and posted content including a video calling to “bomb Tel Aviv” and the words "Happy New Year, Death To Israel."
Furthermore, Rodriguez’s suspected Bluesky profile picture shows the two terrorists who attacked the Jaffa Light Rail in November 2024.