By Liz Nagy and Kevin Ozebek
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TORRANCE, California (KABC) — Parents in Torrance say they were shocked by the arrest of tutor Cole Tomas Allen, who is charged with the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump.
Allen is accused of storming the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, firing as he ran toward the ballroom. Investigators say Allen was armed with a shotgun, a handgun and multiple knives.
In his first court appearance on Monday, Allen was charged with three federal counts: attempting to assassinate the President of the United States, which potentially carries a life sentence, transportation of a firearm and ammo through interstate commerce and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence.
A secret service agent was hit in an exchange of gunfire, but his bulletproof stopped the bullet. As the investigation continues, it’s still not clear who fired that shot.
The 31-year-old allegedly wrote that administration officials were his targets, “not including [FBI Director Kash] Mr. Patel,” and were “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest,” according to a criminal complaint. He allegedly wrote that Secret Service agents were targets “only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible.”
We’re learning Allen is highly intelligent, shy, socially reclusive, and was at one point a devoted Christian. Just hours after Saturday’s attack, federal agents swarmed the Torrance home where Allen lives with his parents and siblings.
Those who know Allen describe him as a very quiet guy. But now we’re learning that online is where he expressed his anti-Trump views.
ABC news reports that, on a now-deleted Bluesky account, Allen shared posts denouncing Trump’s polices on Iran, Ukraine and ICE. And through reposts, he criticized a reporter in connection with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“The aspiring dictator dismantling your country — and your institution — does not give even the tiniest [expletive] about your little glee-club protest,” one of the posts he reported shared said.
Federal investigators say Allen referred to himself as a “friendly federal assassin” in a note he sent to his family just before the incident. That was not a comforting description for a father who showed up at C2 Education on Monday for what was supposed to be a tutoring session for his daughter with Allen.
Standing outside C2 Education, which tutors students for college entrance exams, Nathania Miranda and her dad said they weren’t so sure she should go in for her tutoring session.
Moments before they pulled up, Joaquin Miranda said he saw the slightly familiar face of Allen flash across his social media feed.
“I screenshot the photo of him, and I showed her like, ‘Do you know this guy?’ I know this guy because I talked to him just once. I talked to him like two weeks ago,” Joaquin said.
“When I went in the car, my dad showed me a photo of him, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I know him. He tutored me three times,'” Nathania said. “He didn’t make me really nervous. He just was like a regular tutor.”
On his LinkedIn, Allen describes himself as a gaming developer, creating a game called “Bohrdom,” which he calls an “atomic fighting game” that is “a skill-based, non-violent asymmetrical fighting game loosely derived from a chemistry model that is itself loosely based on reality.” On the gaming platform Steam, one of the popular tags used to find it was “bullet hell,” and another was “shooter.”
“He was talking about his video game, and yeah, he was talking about it when he was tutoring me, too,” Nathania said.
On Saturday night, 3,000 miles from his Torrance neighborhood, federal prosecutors say her “regular tutor” shook the nation’s capital when he stormed the Washington Hilton, strapped with a shotgun, several knives and more guns, shooting as he ran toward a ballroom where President Trump sat inside.
“It’s scary. It’s scary, very scary,” Joaquin said. “Because you bring your kids… and it was like an assassin guy.”
By all counts, Allen is a highly educated and intelligent man, with a degree in mechanical engineering from Caltech and a master’s in computer science from California State University – Dominguez Hills.
It was during his time at Caltech that Allen worshiped at the Pasadena United Reform Church, which meets on Sundays in South Pasadena.
The pastor described Allen as a, “Nice, gentle, smart young man.”
That’s also how he’s described by neighbors around the Torrance home where he lives with his parents, and that agents swarmed over the weekend.
“I’m sad for his family. His parents are good people. They don’t deserve this,” neighbor Paul Thompson said. “I know they’re very active members of their church, and I believe that his father is in a leadership position in his church.”
ABC7 spoke to a man who appears to be Allen in 2017 at a conference on aging about his own invention.
“The idea with this is to prevent it from moving at all,” he said in the 2017 interview. “The wheelchair brakes tend to lock the wheels, but don’t lock the chair to the ground.”
C2 named Allen “Teacher of the Month” in 2024, but the head of the Torrance Teachers Association told Eyewitness News he had nothing to do with Torrance schools.
“We never ran into him. He was not credentialed in the state, so he would not be able to even work here,” said Julie Shankle, the executive director of the Torrance Teachers Association.
One mother with a student at C2 Education, who didn’t want her name or face shared, said Allen tutored her daughter.
“You’d come across him in the hallways. He wouldn’t look at you or interact. He would come out here and have lunch, and that was about it. Never ‘hi’ or ‘bye,'” she said.
Attorney Steven Harowitz works in the same business complex as C2 Education.
“You’d see him at lunch, and he would eat by himself and look at his phone and basically kept very quiet,” Harowitz said.
“To think that somebody that we live near was armed and dangerous is kind of a scary thought in retrospect,” Thompson said. “I think it’s important that whatever he’s accused of doing, that he face the responsibility for what he’s done.”
Now, parents of students at C2 say they want answers.
“I have a lot of questions. That’s why I was going to go talk to them,” Joaquin said.
C2 Education issued a statement over the weekend, saying they are fully cooperating with the investigation:
“We 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.”
Allen’s sister told investigators that her brother reportedly had several weapons inside the family’s home. She said the weapons were purchased legally, but that their parents did not know about them.
According to California voter registration records, Allen was listed as “no party preference.” Records also show that back in 2024, he donated $25 to a super PAC that was earmarked for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
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