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.
US President Donald Trump, who called the suspect “a very sick person”, said he was thought to have acted alone. Trump, along with the first lady and several top Cabinet members, was escorted out of the Washington Hilton ballroom, where the event was taking place, by the Secret Service.
Shortly afterwards, he said the suspect had been “apprehended” and shared photos of him on the ground, shirtless, along with blurry security footage of what appeared to be a figure darting past security agents.
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 Cole 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. 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, Dominguez Hills in 2025, according to the profile.
Caltech said in a statement that a person of that name graduated in 2017.
Under job experience, the post shows the suspect 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, and 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.