Suspect in shooting of Israeli Embassy staffers railed against Gaza war in online posts

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the years before he was accused of killing two Israeli Embassy employees, the suspect in the fatal shootings was an active participant in Chicago’s left-wing protest scene, speaking out against police violence and a proposed Amazon headquarters. Then the war in Gaza ignited his fury into violence.

Elias Rodriguez, 31, was charged Thursday with the murder of foreign officials and other crimes in connection with the deaths of Israeli citizen Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, an American, as they left an event at a Jewish museum. The couple had plans to become engaged.

He told police after his arrest, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” according to court filings.

Rodriguez lived in a modest 850-square-foot apartment on Chicago’s north side and worked as an administrative assistant at a medical trade group. He had no apparent criminal record.

In his activism, he protested police violence against minorities and the power of corporations. His online posts had recently become fixated on the war in Gaza, calling for retaliation against Israel.

In the window of his apartment hung a photo of Wadee Alfayoumi, a 6-year-old Muslim boy killed in a 2023 stabbing in Chicago shortly after the Oct. 7 attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,200 people in Israel.

A neighbor, John Wayne Fray, described Rodriguez as “quiet and friendly.”

“He seemed like a normal, friendly guy,” Fry told reporters Thursday, standing near yellow crime-scene tape left by law enforcement officers who searched the suspect’s apartment. He said Rodriguez and a woman who lived with him appeared to be “very sensitive people, especially about the issue of Palestine.”

An October 2017 article in Liberation, the online newspaper for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, quoted Rodriguez as a member of the group participating in a protest outside the Chicago home of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel over the police shooting of black teenager Laquan McDonald and the city’s bid to be the site for a new Amazon headquarters. A photo of a man holding a protest sign published with the article appeared to match photos of Rodriguez posted on social media.

The organization denied Thursday that Rodriguez was an active member, though it acknowledged a “brief association” in the past. The group also scrubbed the 2017 article identifying Rodriguez as a member from its website.

“We reject any attempt to associate the PSL with the DC shooting,” the group said in a statement. “We know of no contact with (Rodriguez) in over 7 years. We have nothing to do with this shooting and do not support it.”

As recently as this week, the group’s X feed posted pro-Palestinian statements calling for an end to the war in Gaza and characterizing Israel’s attacks on Palestinians as genocide.

Family members of Rodriguez and his defense attorney, Elizabeth Mullin, did not return messages seeking comment.

The FBI did not respond to questions about whether he was on the bureau’s radar before the shooting.

A GoFundMe page from 2017 sought to raise money to pay Rodriguez’s way to People’s Congress of Resistance, an event in Washington that September to “fight the Trump agenda and the Congress of millionaires!” As part of the appeal, Rodriguez recounted his father’s military service in the Iraq War.

“When my dad came home from Baghdad, he came with souvenirs,” Rodriguez was quoted as saying. “One was a magazine pouch with a warning in Arabic to back away or my dad would shoot and kill you. … He also gave me a patch of Iraq’s national flag, one he ripped off of an Iraqi soldier’s uniform because he could. I don’t want to see another generation of Americans coming home from genocidal imperialist wars with trophies.”

The effort raised $240.

Social media accounts tied to Rodriguez suggest he had become increasingly focused over the last two years on the Israeli bombing campaign and ground invasion in Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 53,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children.

An account on X that used a variation of a screen name Rodriguez had used on other sites, along with his given name and photo, frequently featured pro-Palestinian posts, including a video from an October 2023 protest in downtown Chicago against U.S. aid to Israel.

Last October, the account also reposted two videos of speeches by Hassan Nasrallah, a Lebanese cleric and a former leader of Islamic militant group Hezbollah. Nasrallah had been killed two weeks earlier in an Israeli airstrike.

Less than an hour after the shooting in Washington on Thursday night, the X account posted, “Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home,” along with screen grabs of a nearly 1,000-word essay signed with Rodriguez’s name. It was not immediately clear whether Rodriguez, who was in police custody at the time, had used a feature on X to schedule the release of the post in advance or if another person might have had access to the account.

In the piece, Rodriguez railed against the mounting death toll in Gaza, saying Israel “had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well.”

About 11 years ago, he wrote, he “personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine.” He sought to justify what he called “the morality of armed demonstration,” adding “those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity.”

“The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification,” he wrote. “We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians’ forgiveness.”

Rodriguez also invoked the death last year of Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force who he set himself ablaze outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington while declaring that he “will no longer be complicit in genocide.”

Bushnell’s sacrifice, he wrote, was “not made in vain.” Court records say Rodriguez made similar remarks about Bushnell after he was taken into custody, describing the man as “courageous” and a “martyr.”

At the end of the screed, Rodrigez expressed his love for his parents, his younger sister and the “rest of my familia.” He signed off with “Free Palestine” and the emoji for the Palestinian flag.

Rodriguez’s employer, the American Osteopathic Information Association, issued a statement Thursday expressing shock and saying it would cooperate with investigators.

“As a physician organization dedicated to protecting the health and sanctity of human life, we believe in the rights of all persons to live safely without fear of violence,” the group said.

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Mustian reported from New York.

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/