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<\/p>\nBefore authorities charged him with attempting to assassinate President Trump and top administration officials in a brazen attack at the Washington Hilton, Cole Tomas Allen lived what those who knew him described as a quiet, simple existence. <\/p>\n
He worked as a tutor and enjoyed video games, manga and riding his blue scooter. Acquaintances said Allen rarely talked about his political views through much of his adult life. <\/p>\n
But on social media, he appears to have expressed concerns about the morality of U.S. policy, particularly its role in the wars in Ukraine and Iran. <\/p>\n
Now, those who crossed paths with him are struggling to square the accusations against him with the man they knew as an unassuming student, gamer and teacher. <\/p>\n
Allen grew up in a middle-class, suburban part of Torrance, one of four siblings who would each go on to study at reputable universities.<\/p>\n
His parents were both teachers and \u201creally solid members of their community,\u201d according to Paul Thompson, a Los Angeles County prosecutor who lives next door to the family\u2019s two-story house. Allen\u2019s father knew many people on the block of single-family homes by their first names, Thompson said, and the suspect\u2019s mother once saved Thompson\u2019s dog when it ran into the road. <\/p>\n
As a high school junior, Allen led Pacific Lutheran\u2019s volleyball team in a three-set win over Junipero Serra High School. He was homeschooled, but was allowed via a special program to take a class at Pacific Lutheran in Gardena and to play for its respected squad, according to the private school\u2019s principal.<\/p>\n
Allen was \u201ca godly person\u201d who never cursed or shared his political views at the time, a former teammate told The Times, but he was also \u201cvery competitive.\u201d<\/p>\n
That drive extended to academics. After finishing his homeschooling, he was accepted into Caltech, one of the best universities in the nation for aspiring engineers like Allen. <\/p>\n
He joined the Caltech Christian Fellowship, taking on a leadership role in which he organized Bible discussions, as well as the fencing team and the Nerf Club. He interned at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Ca\u00f1ada Flintridge for three months.<\/p>\n
In 2016, he was part of a five-person team that won an annual robotics and design competition in which teams built robots to play in soccer matches at Caltech. Allen was a teaching assistant at the Pasadena school, where he graduated with a mechanical engineering degree the following year.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth Terlinden met Allen through the Caltech Christian Fellowship, where she was co-president during the 2014-15 school year. <\/p>\n
\u201cQuiet guy, kind of nondescript, generally polite, got good grades,\u201d she told The Times, describing her impression of Allen. \u201cChristian definitely, but that\u2019s because I interacted with him primarily in that context.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michael D\u2019Asaro, who coached fencing at Caltech around the time Allen was in college, said that he didn\u2019t remember Allen but that generally none of the students attended practice regularly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose kids were more interested in studying than sports, as you can imagine,\u201d he said in a text message. \u201cThey would spend days and nights in the lab.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Caltech, Allen went on to work as a mechanical engineer for a South Pasadena firm called IJK Controls. <\/p>\n
Kevin Baragona said he and Allen worked together \u201cmaking stabilized gimbals for Hollywood\u201d at IJK for about six months.<\/p>\n
Baragona, who left IJK in January 2018 to found the company DeepAI, said in an interview via FaceTime from rural China that Allen seemed \u201ckind of tired, unmotivated, like he didn\u2019t want to really work hard, and maybe depressed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baragona said that Allen was mainly interested in video games, and that Allen even showed him a couple of games he had made or was working on.<\/p>\n
Allen was at IJK for less than a year and a half, according to his LinkedIn profile, which states that he worked as a self-employed \u201cIndie Game Developer\u201d from September 2018 to March 2020.<\/p>\n
In 2019, he registered a trademark for an esoteric video game called \u201cBohrdom,\u201d a \u201chybrid of a bullet hell and a racing game\u201d based on atomic theory, in which electrons and protons compete. \u201cBohrdom\u201d languished on the Steam gaming platform. Three other projects Allen detailed in his professional bio remained unfinished.<\/p>\n
Then, in March 2020, he took a job as a tutor at C2 Education. In December 2024, he was named teacher of the year at the test preparation and tutoring company in a Spanish-tiled Torrance shopping center. People who knew him through his work there described him in interviews as intelligent and professional.<\/p>\n
In May 2025, Allen received a master\u2019s degree from Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, six miles from his parents\u2019 home in Torrance.<\/p>\n
Bin Tang, a professor in the university\u2019s computer science department, described Allen as a \u201cvery good student. … Soft-spoken, very polite, a good fellow.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cI am very shocked to see the news,\u201d he told the Associated Press.<\/p>\n
Joaquin Miranda knew he recognized the photo circulating online of a man posing in a graduation gown at Cal State Dominguez Hills, but he couldn\u2019t quite place it. So on Monday, the 48-year-old showed the picture to his 13-year-old daughter, who told him it was of Allen, \u201cmy tutor guy,\u201d who had tutored her in English at C2. <\/p>\n
\u201cShe can\u2019t believe it, because he was very nice, very professional and a very cool guy,\u201d Miranda said of his daughter. \u201cSo yeah, it\u2019s crazy.\u201d <\/p>\n
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The Torrance home connected to Cole Tomas Allen.<\/p>\n
(Robbin Goddard \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
At the heart of the case against Allen is a document federal authorities allege he sent family members. <\/p>\n
The writer of the document apologized to his parents, colleagues and others before laying out his \u201crules of engagement\u201d \u2014 guests, hotel security and staff and other people not in elected office or government were \u201cnot targets.\u201d The author says he was targeting top Trump administration officials because he was \u201cno longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the document was indeed written by Allen, Baragona said it would represent a fundamental change from the person he knew when they were making gimbals together at IJK Controls. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of sad, really,\u201d Baragona said of the transformation Allen\u2019s worldview apparently underwent in recent years. \u201cIt\u2019s tragic and sad.\u201d<\/p>\n
The document was signed \u201cCole \u2018coldForce\u2019 \u2018Friendly Federal Assassin\u2019 Allen,\u201d echoing the usernames the FBI in a court filing said Allen used online.<\/p>\n
Federal authorities have not identified the specific accounts, but The Times found multiple similarly named social media profiles likely used by Allen, with close variations of the same distinctive username, @coldForce3000, that Allen used on a chess account created with his confirmed email addresses. The accounts have been taken down, but much of their contents remain accessible on the Internet Archive.<\/p>\n
Across more than 5,000 posts extending from 2021 to days before last weekend\u2019s White House Correspondents\u2019 Assn. dinner, where the attack attributed to him took place, Allen\u2019s social media history shows that what started as a singular immersion into the online gaming world became consumed in condemnation of Trump, his administration and war. The rhetoric was often harsh \u2014 likening the president to a mob boss or calling him a sociopath \u2014 but did not espouse violence.<\/p>\n
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A sketch of Cole Tomas Allen in court.<\/p>\n
(Dana Verkouteren \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
For years, SoCal Twitter user @CForce3000, under the name \u201ccoldForce,\u201d posted almost exclusively about gaming, and \u201cSuper Smash Bros. Ultimate\u201d in particular, the same fighting game Allen played competitively as an online brawler. <\/p>\n
The account changed abruptly the day after Russia\u2019s April 2023 missile attack on Slovyansk, in eastern Ukraine. Eleven people, including a toddler, died in the shelling of a residential building. The feed from @CForce3000<\/a> carried images of the bloodshed.<\/p>\n Subsequent Ukraine-related posts followed, along with pleas for donations to buy jeeps, equipment and supplies for combatants in the country. By early 2024, the account had broadened to domestic concerns, including opinions on student activism at Columbia University in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone makes mistakes in college,\u201d @CForce3000 wrote <\/a>in May 2024, criticizing the activists, who risked expulsion. \u201cBurning down your parents\u2019 life accomplishments and your own future to demonstrably degrade the image of your (presumably) recent cause is not really one I\u2019d recommend,\u201d the user posted, \u201clike, my parents woulda *buried* me if i picked this as a \u2018hill to die on.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For the next year, @CForce3000 shared hundreds of posts from sources as diverse as Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and former Ukrainian diplomat Maria Drutska. The account became a repeater of condemnations by Trump critics calling the president an ally of Russia and decrying his failure to support Ukraine and his involvement with late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n In November 2024, @CForce3000 announced the account was migrating to BlueSky, saying of X, \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s much reason to be on here anymore.\u201d In early 2025 on BlueSky, coldForce chose an avatar plucked from the anime series \u201cGintama\u201d: the heroine Kagura in her berserk state, insane with rage.<\/p>\n \u201cHi! I\u2019m a random Californian guy with posts about American politics, support for Ukraine, and observations of small creatures,\u201d read the new coldForce account bio. \u201cI choose my own battlefields. Not through my blood, but with my heart. I stand on the battlefield to protect what I want.\u201d<\/p>\n The BlueSky user continued to forward requests for donations to equip Ukrainian troops. It decried federal immigration raids and posted about a toddler who nearly died at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Texas. In reposting a feed that called Elon Musk a white supremacist, coldForce mused that the Tesla CEO and X owner was a \u201cgenius with effective(?) autism\u201d struggling to understand humanity.<\/p>\n The rhetoric sharpened this spring when Trump began posting threats to bomb Iran, saying that \u201ca whole civilization will die tonight.\u201d On BlueSky, coldForce shared posts from Democratic pundits and leaders, including in Congress, who called for Trump\u2019s impeachment, and those who described the president as \u201cderanged\u201d and \u201ca sociopathic mob boss.\u201d<\/p>\n Cole Allen reportedly purchased a handgun at CAP Tactical Firearms in Lawndale. <\/p>\n (Eric Thayer \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n \u201cTrump must be removed from office. He has no capacity to do the job, and he\u2019s destroying the US and the world with incoherent flailing,\u201d read an April 12 message by Minnesota liberal activist Will Stancil that coldForce reposted. \u201cHe thinks he can bully and blackmail the whole world and will start WW3 or nuke someone eventually. He absolutely cannot [be] allowed to continue.\u201d<\/p>\n To these, coldForce added:<\/p>\n \u201cIf we can call for russians to oppose putin, we can and must oppose trump no less.\u201d<\/p>\n On April 6, federal authorities say Allen used his phone to search \u201cwhite house correspondents dinner 2026\u201d and booked a room at the Washington Hilton. <\/p>\n Allen allegedly traveled by train across the country from California, arriving in Washington, D.C., on April 23 and checking into his room at the Washington Hilton, where the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner was scheduled two nights later.<\/p>\n At 8:03 p.m. April 25, he snapped a mirror selfie in his hotel room, according to a pretrial detention memo filed by prosecutors Wednesday. He looked into the camera, eyebrows raised with a hint of a smile. Allen wore a black dress shirt and slacks, a red tie tucked into his pants and a small leather bag prosecutors say was filled with ammunition. He also allegedly wore a shoulder holster and knife in his waistband.<\/p>\n At 8:27 p.m., he pulled up a live feed of Trump en route to the event. Minutes later, as the president sat on an open stage during the fete, Allen allegedly<\/a> ran through a magnetometer and past Secret Service agents toward the ballroom before firing at least one shotgun round in the direction of the stairs leading down to the ballroom, the memo said. <\/p>\n Secret Service agents respond during the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner.<\/p>\n (Tom Brenner \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1777836778_673_.jpeg\")
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