The man suspected of opening hearth on the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday night time worked as a teacher and online game developer from Southern California, in response to public data.
Cole Tomas Allen, 31, who lives in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance, has been recognized by regulation enforcement as the armed man subdued close to the dinner the place President Trump and different officers had gathered, two sources acquainted with the matter informed NCS.
A LinkedIn profile matching his identify and picture described him as a part-time teacher at C2 Education, a check prep and tutoring firm. C2 named Allen the corporate’s “teacher of the month” in December 2024, in response to social media posts from the corporate. No one answered a telephone quantity for C2 late Saturday night.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Allen graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 2017 with a bachelor’s diploma in mechanical engineering, and obtained a grasp’s diploma in laptop science from California State University-Dominguez Hills final 12 months.
As a scholar at Caltech, he was featured in a local news report in 2017 for growing a prototype emergency brake for wheelchairs.
Allen donated $25 to Kamala Harris’ presidential marketing campaign in October 2024, in response to Federal Election Commission data.
Allen additionally described himself as a online game developer on his LinkedIn profile, and seems to have printed an indie sport referred to as Bohrdom on the market on the Steam gaming platform for $1.99. He registered a trademark for the sport’s identify in 2018, in response to federal trademark data.
On his LinkedIn, Allen wrote that he was “currently developing a second game, working name ‘First Law.’”
NCS’s Curt Devine, Scott Glover, Kyung Lah and Majlie de Puy Kamp contributed reporting.