Background of White House Dinner Shooter Revealed: Donated to Trump's Opponent as an Independent, Transformed from Engineering Graduate to Lone Wolf

On April 26, further details about Cole Thomas Allen, the shooter at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, have been disclosed. The 31-year-old from Torrance, California, had no prior criminal record and was not on the radar of U.S. law enforcement, being preliminarily identified as a ‘lone wolf’ perpetrator. Allen graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and is set to receive a master’s degree in computer science from California State University, Dominguez Hills in 2025. He describes himself on LinkedIn as ‘a mechanical engineer and computer scientist by background, an independent game developer by experience, and a teacher by vocation.’ He has worked as a part-time teacher at C2 Education, a college entrance exam tutoring organization, for several years and was named ‘Teacher of the Month’ at its Torrance branch in December 2024. He also developed an independent game called ‘Bohrdom,’ which was released on the Steam platform in 2018. As a professional in the education and technology fields, Allen participated in activities such as the Caltech Christian Fellowship and the Nerf Club. On the eve of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, he made a small donation to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a teacher and registered to vote as an ‘independent.’ LinkedIn data shows that Allen also interned at NASA in 2014, contributing to the development of intelligent models for planetary mapping.