Who is Elias Rodriguez? Socialist group disavows ‘DC shooter’

A 30-year-old suspect from Chicago has been charged after the killing of two Israeli embassy staff outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

The gunman was named by police as Elias Rodriguez, 30, of Chicago.

The suspect in the shooting of two Israeli embassy employees outside the Capital Jewish Museum was identified as a left-wing activist who appeared to be opposed to the war on Gaza.

Elias Rodriguez, 31, from Chicago, was arrested after a gunman shot the couple dead before heading inside the museum, where guests of an event organised by the American Jewish Association came to his aid and brought him water, thinking he needed help. However, when police arrived minutes later, the man pulled a red keffiyeh, or Palestinian scarf, from his pocket and repeatedly chanted, “Free Palestine”.

Red keffiyehs are often associated with the Marxist-Leninist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Police were last night (Thursday) investigating links between Rodriguez and a 900-word anti-Israel manifesto published a day before the attack and signed by an “Elias Rodriguez”. It has not been independently verified by The Times.

FBI agents cordon off the scene outside the Capital Jewish Museum following a shooting that left two people dead. Picture: Alex Wroblewski/AFP

“Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point,” the letter reads. “But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much.” It concludes with the words “Free Palestine”.

Federal agents and bomb disposal units cordoned off an apartment building in the East Albany Park neighbourhood of Chicago yesterday (Thursday) morning. In the windows were two pro-Palestinian signs, including one that read “Justice for Wadea”, referring to six-year-old Palestinian-American Wadea al-Fayoume, who was stabbed 26 times in 2023 at his home in Illinois in what was determined to be a hate crime.

Yaron Lischinsky, right, and Sarah Milgrim.

Pam Bondi, the attorney-general, and members of an antisemitism task force visited the site of the shooting yesterday (Thursday) morning.

The suspect did not appear in an initial search of crime databases, DC Metropolitan Police said.

Rodriguez had previously been linked to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). However, the group said he is not a member and that he only had a brief association with one branch that ended in 2017. “We reject any attempt to associate the PSL with the DC shooting. Elias Rodriguez is not a member of the PSL,” the group wrote on X.

A GoFundMe page launched by the social justice coalition Answer Chicago in 2017 describes a man with Rodriguez’s name and appearance as a “young resister” and the “son of an Iraq war veteran”.

Law enforcement officials from the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force and Chicago Police participate in a search of the apartment where shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez lived in Chicago, Illinois. Picture: Scott Olson/Getty Images/AFP

That same year, an article by Liberation, the newspaper of the left-wing PSL, listed an “Elias Rodriguez” as one of its activists in an article about the police shooting of the 17-year-old black youth Laquan McDonald in Chicago in 2014.

Images circulating on social media appear to show Rodriguez at a Black Lives Matter protest on the three-year anniversary of the killing of McDonald.

According to a LinkedIn page believed to belong to Rodriguez, he holds an English degree from the University of Illinois and was employed by the AOIA, a non-profit organisation that works with the osteopathic profession, as a profiles administrative specialist since 2024.

Before that, Rodriguez worked as a researcher at The HistoryMakers, the “US’s Largest African-American video oral history archive”. On its website, it says Rodriguez “prepares biographies of accomplished leaders in the African-American community”.

The Times