Photo of the suspect in the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting incident posted on President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account on April 25th, 2026.
- The annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was derailed Saturday night after an armed man, Cole Allen, allegedly rushed through a security checkpoint and exchanged gunfire with law enforcement.
- The suspected gunman was apprehended at the scene and is expected to be arraigned on Monday.
- Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the alleged shooter was likely targeting administration officials.
WASHINGTON- The annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was derailed Saturday night after an armed man, Cole Allen, allegedly rushed through a security checkpoint and exchanged gunfire with law enforcement.
The suspected gunman was apprehended at the scene and is expected to be arraigned on Monday. One law enforcement agent was shot but not seriously injured, and all Trump administration officials and lawmakers were safely evacuated. No injuries were reported among the attendees.
After the incident, President Donald Trump — who was attending his first White House Correspondents’ dinner as president — requested that the event be rescheduled. While the dinner was initially set to proceed, it was canceled because law enforcement deemed the venue an active crime scene.
Here’s what we know about Allen:
He was allegedly targeting Trump administration
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the suspected shooter was likely targeting administration officials.
“It does appear the suspect was targeting members of the administration,” Blanche said, noting that authorities are still “looking to try to understand a motive from our preliminary investigation.”
Blanche said it is unclear whether the shooter was targeting “particular members” of the administration, only that “we do understand that that was his goal and his target.”
Traveled from Los Angeles
Blanche said Allen, of Torrance, California, traveled by train from “Los Angeles to Chicago, then Chicago to D.C.”
Allen was booked at the Washington Hilton, where the dinner was being held, and Blanche said he checked in on Friday.
Blanche said the suspect is not cooperating with authorities, and officials have obtained most of the information about him “from other means.”
“We’ve already started talking to folks who knew him, we’ve already started going through the evidence that we collected,” he said.
He was a teacher
Allen was a teacher at C2 Education, a tutoring, test prep and college admissions counseling provider, according to his LinkedIn profile.
C2, in a statement to CNBC, said they “were shocked to hear the news of the horrifying incident that transpired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”
“We are cooperating fully with law enforcement to assist them in their investigation. Violence of any kind is never the answer,” the company said.
His LinkedIn profile shows he graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and from California State University, Dominguez Hills, with a master’s degree in computer science.
Allen wrote a letter
Allen allegedly wrote a detailed letter about his plans, the contents of which were obtained by the New York Post.
In the note published by the Post, Allen allegedly said he is “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
Allen refers to himself as the “friendly federal assassin” in the letter.
The suspected shooter also noted that the security at the event and the Washington Hilton was lighter than he expected, a caveat that many elected officials and attendees have also noted.
Oversight briefings are now expected on Capitol Hill in response to the shooting, which is the third attempt on Trump’s life since 2024.
A spokesperson for Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told MS NOW that the U.S. Secret Service is scheduling a bipartisan briefing on “security protocols and related law enforcement matters involving the White House Correspondents Dinner.”
Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told MS NOW the suspect’s brother contacted the New London, Connecticut, police department about the letters, who then contacted the Secret Service. The Secret Service learned of the letters sometime between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET on Saturday.
He was not on law enforcement’s radar
Blanche said Sunday that there’s “not any indication yet” that Allen was on law enforcement’s radar.
“We’re still investigating what we knew, if anything, about this individual,” he said.
Blanche said Allen purchased “the two firearms that he had on him” within the past two years, and that he had “knives on him as well.”
Despite the apparent security breach and widespread remarks about unusually lax security at the event, Blanche said he is “overly confident that the Secret Service did their job here.”
Allen “barely got past the perimeter, he was immediately subdued. … This is law enforcement doing exactly what they’ve trained their whole lives to do.”
The suspect’s writings
Just moments before the attack, Allen sent family members a note apologizing to his parents, colleagues, students, bystanders and others for what he was about to do, according to a transcript of some of Allen’s writings provided to NBC News by a senior administration official.
“I don’t expect forgiveness,” Allen wrote. “Again, my sincere apologies.”
In the note, Allen criticized Trump without mentioning him by name. He wrote about lax security at the hotel, saying he had expected more.
He also described his “expected rules of engagement,” writing: “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” He appeared to be referring to FBI Director Kash Patel.
Later, he added: “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.”
The senior administration official said that Allen’s brother contacted the New London Police Department in Connecticut when he received the note.
The department confirmed being contacted at around 10:49 p.m. Saturday, just over two hours after the shooting, “by an individual who expressed concern about the incident that occurred at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner earlier in the evening.” Police contacted federal law enforcement and the caller was interviewed by authorities.
Allen’s sister told the Secret Service and Montgomery County Police after the shooting that her brother had a tendency to make radical statements and he had referred to a plan to do “something” to fix the issues with today’s world, the senior administration official said.
A Bluesky account believed to belong to Allen and verified by NBC News included recent posts or reposts that were critical of Trump and his administration’s policies, as well as of the U.S. war with Iran and Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Described as a ‘borderline genius’
The suspect, who was not shot but was taken to a local hospital, is expected to be charged in federal court on Monday. In a press briefing shortly after the attack, Trump called the suspected shooter a “whack job” and a “lone wolf.”
Public records and interviews show that Allen was a trained engineer who once interned for NASA, and participated in the Nerf club and Christian fellowship at his prestigious California university, before more recently developing video games and working as a part-time teacher.
Allen attended Pacific Lutheran High School in Gardena, California, where he was known for his inquisitiveness and intellect, a former volleyball teammate told NBC News. While he had not seen Allen recently, he remembered Allen as a “borderline genius” and “super stable.”
“Other people study hard,” said the ex-teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear it could affect his career. “He didn’t have to study. It would just come to him. He was really, really smart.”
The former teammate said Allen was interested in coding and computers, but he was also a very good writer and seemed to be well-versed in several subjects.
“Across the board, he was really knowledgeable, really curious,” the ex-teammate said.
The teammate said they lost touch with Allen once he went off to the California Institute of Technology, a private research university in Pasadena, California, but expressed surprise that he would be the suspect in Saturday’s attack.
“He was probably the most gentle person on the team, which makes it even more shocking that he did this,” the ex-teammate said.
Recently won ‘teacher of the month’
According to his LinkedIn profile, Allen graduated from the California Institute of Technology, commonly known as Caltech, in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. The school confirmed it had a record of a student named Cole Allen who graduated in 2017.
While he was a Caltech student, Allen was a member of the winning group of the 31st annual Mechanical Engineering 72 Design Competition, which involved building robots that could play soccer. In the 2016 competition, his five-person group “Blitzkrieg Bots”competed against four other teams for the “Tridroid Cup.”
Months later, Allen was featured in a local news report for developing a prototype emergency brake for wheelchairs.
“The wheelchair brakes tend to lock the wheels, but don’t lock the chair to the ground. But with this device, that will prevent the chair from skidding at all,” Allen told ABC7 in 2017.
After graduating from Caltech, Allen worked for a year as a mechanical engineer before becoming an independent video game developer and later also a part-time teacher at C2 Education, a company dedicated to helping high schoolers get into college, according to the LinkedIn profile.
In December 2024, C2 Education named Allen its “teacher of the month.”
That same year, Allen donated $25 to ActBlue with the memo “Earmarked for Harris for President,” according to Federal Election Commission filings. In the donation, he listed his occupation as teacher for C2 Education.
“We were shocked to hear the news of the horrifying incident that transpired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” C2 Education said in a statement. “We are cooperating fully with law enforcement to assist them in their investigation. Violence of any kind is never the answer.”
Dylan Wakayama, president of the Asian American Civic Trust, told NBC News that Allen tutored one student who volunteers at his Torrance-based nonprofit, as well as the sibling of another.
“They described him as someone who was very intelligent,” Wakayama said. “They never would have expected this.”
The student who received tutoring from Allen told Wakayama that she had met with him as recently as April 14 and there were no signs that anything was amiss.
“It’s been that recent,” she texted Wakayama Saturday night, according to him. “Bio, math, English, Science, literally everything.”
“He’s so smart,” she added in the text, according to Wakayama.
According to LinkedIn, Allen began working as a “self-employed” indie game developer in September 2018, and appears to have released an “atomic fighting game” called Bohrdom on Steam that year. In a trailer for the game, according to WIRED, it is described as a “non-violent, skill-based, asymmetrical fighting game loosely based on a chemistry model that is itself loosely based on reality.”
Kept guns hidden from family
Paul Thompson, one of Allen’s neighbors, said Allen lived with his parents and rode a blue moped around the area. He said Allen was “not necessarily friendly,” but he hadn’t noticed anything off about him. He added that Allen’s “parents are nice, friendly people,” and the “father especially knows everybody.”
Records show that Allen purchased a Maverick 12 gauge shotgun in August 2025 and an Armscor Precision .38 semi-automatic pistol in October 2023.
A senior law enforcement official told NBC News those were the two weapons they recovered from Allen on Saturday night.
In the interview with law enforcement, Allen’s sister confirmed he purchased two handguns and a shotgun from CAP Tactical Firearms and kept them stored at their parents’ home, according to a senior administration official. She added that their parents were unaware that Allen was keeping the firearms in the home.
Allen regularly went to a shooting range to train with his firearms, and was a part of a group called “The Wide Awakes,” the sister said in the interview, according to the official. His sister said he attended a “No Kings” anti-Trump protest in California at some point.
In the note to his family, Allen wrote about the type of ammunition he would use in “order to minimize casualties.”
Federal charges
Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., said the suspect would be charged with two counts of using a firearm during a crime of violence and a second crime of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon. She added that “many more charges” were expected to be filed.
Late Saturday night local time, the FBI and Secret Service were at a home believed to be associated with Allen in Torrance, a city of around 140,000 residents in California’s South Bay, about 15 miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles.
The FBI executed a search warrant related to the incident, said Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California.
Saturday’s shooting rocked attendees of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, an annual event attended by the Washington press corps, presidential administration staffers and celebrities.
Trump had attended the dinner before he first became president but skipped it throughout his first term. Saturday was the first time he attended as president, and he was accompanied by first lady Melania Trump.
They and others were seated at the front of the ballroom when video captured what sounded like at least five loud bangs before armed officers rushed in and hauled the president, first lady, Vice President JD Vance and others away while other attendees ducked down under tables.
“I heard a noise and sort of thought it was a tray. I thought it was a tray going down,” Trump said from the White House briefing room Saturday night after the shooting.
“Melania was very cognizant, I think, of what happened,” the president said. “I think she knew immediately what happened. She was saying, ‘That’s a bad noise.’”
CNBC/ NBC NEWS
