ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
This afternoon, a suspect was charged in the killing of two people outside a Jewish museum here in Washington. He faces several counts, including two of first-degree murder, murder of a foreign official and gun charges. President Trump has called the attack an act of antisemitism. NPR's Odette Yousef and Jennifer Ludden are covering this story and here with the latest. Hi there.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: Hi.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: Hi.
SHAPIRO: Jennifer, to begin with, what do police say happened?
LUDDEN: Well, there was an event for young diplomats at the Capital Jewish Museum downtown. It was hosted by the American Jewish Committee. And police say the suspect had been pacing outside the museum. And then after the event, around 9 o'clock last night, he targeted a group of four people and shot dead two of them. They say he then ran into the museum and was detained.
SHAPIRO: Israel's ambassador to the U.S. has said that the two people killed both worked at the embassy here. He said they were a young couple about to be engaged. What more can you tell us about them?
LUDDEN: Yes. Yaron Lischinsky was 30. He was a research assistant at the embassy. Sarah Lynn Milgrim was 26, and she organized trips to Israel. The ambassador said Lischinsky had bought a ring and planned to propose next week, on a trip to Jerusalem. Now, Lischinsky's family had spent time in Germany. He had both German and Israeli citizenship. Friends say he actually was a devout Christian. In a social media post in 2021, he wrote that Israel is the only place in the Middle East where Christians can thrive.
I spoke with a friend of Sarah Milgrim's - someone who knew her through the embassy here in D.C. Israeli attorney Ayelet Razin Bet Or has been researching sexual violence during the Hamas attack on Israel - that was on October 7, 2023 - and Milgrim coordinated her U.S. presentations. She says Milgrim was charming. She was always smiling. She'd light up a room, and that she saw a serious role for herself when she chose a job in diplomacy.
AYELET RAZIN BET OR: Sarah told me that she joined the embassy shortly after October 7 - after she felt a high rise of antisemitism around her, unlike anything she experienced before.
LUDDEN: Razin Bet Or calls it a really painful irony that Milgrim died in the kind of antisemitic attack that she has - was struggling to combat.
SHAPIRO: Odette, turning to you - you went to the Chicago neighborhood this morning where the suspect is believed to live. What did you see?
YOUSEF: Yeah, Ari. This is, you know, a leafy, quiet, residential side street in a neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. It's a very diverse area with lots of Mexican, Middle Eastern and Asian establishments nearby. This is an area of the city with lots of families with kids, you know, near the Chicago train stop. The building is a red-brick multi-unit building. When I got there, I actually walked right up to the entryway, and here's a sense of what I was seeing. And you can hear in this the helicopters that were buzzing overhead.
(SOUNDBITE OF HELICOPTER ROTORS WHIRRING)
YOUSEF: I'm at the address listed as the subject's. In the windows of the first-floor apartment there are political signs. There's also a sign in one of the windows to the right with a picture of a small boy, and under it, it says, justice for Wadea.
Wadea - that's referring to Wadea al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian American child in south suburban Chicago. You'll recall, Ari, he was stabbed to death by his landlord in a hate crime a week after the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. There were other posters in the window - one for the local council member who's with the Democratic Socialists of America, another one saying, ceasefire now, and some other leftist messaging. And basically, as soon as I snapped a picture, an FBI agent rushed me away because then, half a dozen black suburbans suddenly came down the block, stopped, and agents in full tactical gear got out and went into the unit.
SHAPIRO: Did you learn anything about the suspect himself?
YOUSEF: Most of what we know so far has come from court documents. They say that he purchased the 9-millimeter gun in Illinois five years ago and had it in his checked luggage when he flew from Chicago to D.C. the day before the attack. In an interview with police, he expressed admiration for an individual who had set himself on fire in protest of the war and called that individual, quote, "a martyr."
The FBI says they're examining some online writings that may be connected to the suspect. I've looked through some of those. There are posts that embrace political violence - one of them suggesting to bomb a journalism outlet, another one saying, death to Israel, and reposts of videos featuring the former leader of the militant anti-Israel group Hezbollah. But again, we haven't confirmed that these are his accounts. He has no criminal record prior to this that we could find, so it's still lots of questions.
SHAPIRO: Reporting there from NPR's Odette Yousef and Jennifer Ludden. Thank you both.
LUDDEN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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