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The suspect arrested in the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting was identified by a law enforcement official as Cole Tomas Allen.
After shooting on Saturday, April 15, the police has named the suspect as Cole Allenn, 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, Reuters reported.
Who is Cole Tomas Allen?
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."
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, as per the profile.
Caltech said in a statement that a person of that name graduated in 2017.
