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The suspect arrested in the White House correspondents’ dinner shooting on Saturday was identified by a law enforcement official as Cole Tomas Allen, a Los Angeles-area man who appears from social media sites to be a Caltech graduate working as a part-time teacher and game developer.
The official said Allen, approximately 31 years of age, is a resident of Torrance, California, a coastal town that is part of the South Bay area adjacent to Los Angeles abutting Santa Monica Bay.
The chief of the District of Columbia police department said investigators believe the suspect was a guest at the Washington Hilton hotel, where the annual dinner was taking place, but that no motive had been determined.
Facebook postings appearing to relate to Allen show that he was named “Teacher of the Month” in December 2024 by the Torrance office of C2 Education, a nationwide private test-preparation and tutoring service for college-bound students.
U.S. President Donald Trump took a question late Saturday from Weijia Jiang, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, after nearby gunfire sparked a major security response at the annual dinner. The CBS News reporter had been seated at the same table as the president for the gala event.
A LinkedIn profile in the suspect’s name describes him as a “mechanical engineer and computer scientist by degree, independent game developer by experience, teacher by birth.”
He obtained a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2017, and a master’s degree in computer science from California State University at Dominguez Hills in 2025, according to the profile.
Caltech said in a statement that a person of that name graduated in 2017.
U.S. President Donald Trump posted video and photos on social media of the suspect in what’s being described as a ‘shooting incident’ at the White House correspondents’ dinner Saturday night.
Under job experience, the post shows he has worked for the past several years as a part-time teacher for C2 Education and as a self-employed game developer. He previously worked as a mechanical engineer for a company called IJK Controls in South Pasadena for a year before that as a Caltech teaching assistant.
The profile also includes a local newspaper article “on a robotics competition my team won” at Caltech in 2016.
Under “Causes,” it lists only: “Science and Technology.”
The Secret Service said the suspect was armed with a shotgun and was taken into custody after opening fire at a Secret Service agent in the Washington Hilton Hotel, outside the ballroom where the event was attended by President Donald Trump, his wife Melania, Vice President JD Vance and several cabinet secretaries.
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