The event that shook the American political elite into turbulent play

The suspect arrested in the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday was identified by a police officer as Cole Thomas Allen, a Los Angeles man who, judging by social media, appears to be a Caltech graduate student who works as a part-time teacher and game developer.

The official said Allen, who is about 31 years old, is a resident of Torrance, California, a coastal city in the South Bay area of Los Angeles bordering 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 being held, but a motive has not been determined, Reuters reported.

Facebook posts that appear to be related to Cole show that in December 2024, he was named “Teacher of the Month” by the Torrance office of C2 Education, a private national test preparation and tutoring service for students heading to college.

The suspect’s LinkedIn profile describes him as “a mechanical engineer and computer scientist by graduation, a freelance game developer by experience, a teacher by birth.”

According to the profile, he received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2017 and a master’s degree in computer science from California State University, Dominguez Hills in 2025. Caltech said in a statement that the person with that name graduated in 2017.

Under work experience, the post shows that he has worked as a part-time teacher for C2 Education and as a self-employed game developer for the past few years. He previously worked as a mechanical engineer for a company called IJK Controls in South Pasadena for a year before that as a teaching assistant at Caltech.

The profile also includes a local newspaper article “about a robotics competition my team won” at Caltech in 2016. Under “Causes,” it says only: “Science and technology.”

The Secret Service said the suspect was armed with a shotgun and was taken into custody after opening fire on a Secret Service agent at the Washington Hilton Hotel, outside a ballroom where President Donald Trump, his wife Melania, Vice President J.D. Vance and several cabinet secretaries were attending the event. /tesheshi

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Source: prizrenpost