WASHINGTON — Mourners trickled past the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, on Thursday, a day after an attacker shot dead two Israeli embassy staffers outside the building the night before. Some knelt at the scene with bouquets, others wrote notes to the victims in Hebrew and English, and a handful waved Israeli flags at an impromptu gathering across the street.

The mourners were Jews and Christians from the city and the surrounding area. Several had driven up to an hour to visit the scene and pay their respects to the dead. Others were seeking community and an outlet for a feeling of helplessness.

Jim Rose, from the nearby suburb of Great Falls, Virginia, said he had felt compelled to visit the scene because he is a part of the local Jewish community.

“There was a shock, but there was no surprise,” he said when he first heard about the killings.

He said his friends and family were overwhelmed by sadness, a feeling he shares, “but my number one emotion is anger,” an emotion, he said, that was “based on fear.”

“To me, it was just a matter of time before something like this happened in our community,” he said. “I’m just frustrated that more wasn’t done to prevent this.”

“You could just see it building, just with the rhetoric and what is allowed in protests,” he said. “The anger and the frustration is at those people in authority who either shrug this off or rationalize it, or compartmentalize it. I would like to see each and every one of them do more or step down and let somebody else do the job.”

The victims of the shooting, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were gunned down outside an event for young Jewish diplomats, this year focusing on resolving humanitarian crises in the Middle East, at the Capital Jewish Museum on Wednesday night. Lischinsky and Milgrim were a couple and Lischinsky was planning to propose in Jerusalem next week.

The man charged with the shooting, Elias Rodriguez, shot the two in the back, then finished them off at close range, firing into Milgrim as she attempted to crawl away. After the killings, he told investigators, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,”

© The Times of Israel