Who is Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting?
- By Reuters -
- Apr 26, 2026
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 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.”
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* 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.
* 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.”