Before 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
His parents were both teachers and “really solid members of their community,” according to Paul Thompson, a Los Angeles County prosecutor who lives next door to the family’s two-story house. Allen’s father knew many people on the block of single-family homes by their first names, Thompson said, and the suspect’s mother once saved Thompson’s dog when it ran into the road.
As a high school junior, Allen led Pacific Lutheran’s 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’s principal.
Allen was “a godly person” who never cursed or shared his political views at the time, a former teammate told The Times, but he was also “very competitive.”
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.
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 Cañada Flintridge for three months.
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.
Elizabeth Terlinden met Allen through the Caltech Christian Fellowship, where she was co-president during the 2014-15 school year.
“Quiet guy, kind of nondescript, generally polite, got good grades,” she told The Times, describing her impression of Allen. “Christian definitely, but that’s because I interacted with him primarily in that context.”
Michael D’Asaro, who coached fencing at Caltech around the time Allen was in college, said that he didn’t remember Allen but that generally none of the students attended practice regularly.
“Those kids were more interested in studying than sports, as you can imagine,” he said in a text message. “They would spend days and nights in the lab.”
After Caltech, Allen went on to work as a mechanical engineer for a South Pasadena firm called IJK Controls.
Kevin Baragona said he and Allen worked together “making stabilized gimbals for Hollywood” at IJK for about six months.
Baragona, who left IJK in January 2018 to found the company DeepAI, said in an interview via FaceTime from rural China that Allen seemed “kind of tired, unmotivated, like he didn’t want to really work hard, and maybe depressed.”
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.
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 “Indie Game Developer” from September 2018 to March 2020.
In 2019, he registered a trademark for an esoteric video game called “Bohrdom,” a “hybrid of a bullet hell and a racing game” based on atomic theory, in which electrons and protons compete. “Bohrdom” languished on the Steam gaming platform. Three other projects Allen detailed in his professional bio remained unfinished.
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.
In May 2025, Allen received a master’s degree from Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, six miles from his parents’ home in Torrance.
Bin Tang, a professor in the university’s computer science department, described Allen as a “very good student. … Soft-spoken, very polite, a good fellow.”
“I am very shocked to see the news,” he told the Associated Press.
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’t 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, “my tutor guy,” who had tutored her in English at C2.
“She can’t believe it, because he was very nice, very professional and a very cool guy,” Miranda said of his daughter. “So yeah, it’s crazy.”
The Torrance home connected to Cole Tomas Allen.
(Robbin Goddard / Los Angeles Times)
At the heart of the case against Allen is a document federal authorities allege he sent family members.
The writer of the document apologized to his parents, colleagues and others before laying out his “rules of engagement” — guests, hotel security and staff and other people not in elected office or government were “not targets.” The author says he was targeting top Trump administration officials because he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
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.
“It’s kind of sad, really,” Baragona said of the transformation Allen’s worldview apparently underwent in recent years. “It’s tragic and sad.”
The document was signed “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen,” echoing the usernames the FBI in a court filing said Allen used online.
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.
Across more than 5,000 posts extending from 2021 to days before last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner, where the attack attributed to him took place, Allen’s 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 — likening the president to a mob boss or calling him a sociopath — but did not espouse violence.
A sketch of Cole Tomas Allen in court.
(Dana Verkouteren / Associated Press)
For years, SoCal Twitter user @CForce3000, under the name “coldForce,” posted almost exclusively about gaming, and “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” in particular, the same fighting game Allen played competitively as an online brawler.
The account changed abruptly the day after Russia’s 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 carried images of the bloodshed.
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.
“Everyone makes mistakes in college,” @CForce3000 wrote in May 2024, criticizing the activists, who risked expulsion. “Burning down your parents’ life accomplishments and your own future to demonstrably degrade the image of your (presumably) recent cause is not really one I’d recommend,” the user posted, “like, my parents woulda *buried* me if i picked this as a ‘hill to die on.’”
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.
In November 2024, @CForce3000 announced the account was migrating to BlueSky, saying of X, “I don’t think there’s much reason to be on here anymore.” In early 2025 on BlueSky, coldForce chose an avatar plucked from the anime series “Gintama”: the heroine Kagura in her berserk state, insane with rage.
“Hi! I’m a random Californian guy with posts about American politics, support for Ukraine, and observations of small creatures,” read the new coldForce account bio. “I choose my own battlefields. Not through my blood, but with my heart. I stand on the battlefield to protect what I want.”
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 “genius with effective(?) autism” struggling to understand humanity.
The rhetoric sharpened this spring when Trump began posting threats to bomb Iran, saying that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” On BlueSky, coldForce shared posts from Democratic pundits and leaders, including in Congress, who called for Trump’s impeachment, and those who described the president as “deranged” and “a sociopathic mob boss.”
Cole Allen reportedly purchased a handgun at CAP Tactical Firearms in Lawndale.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
“Trump must be removed from office. He has no capacity to do the job, and he’s destroying the US and the world with incoherent flailing,” read an April 12 message by Minnesota liberal activist Will Stancil that coldForce reposted. “He thinks he can bully and blackmail the whole world and will start WW3 or nuke someone eventually. He absolutely cannot [be] allowed to continue.”
To these, coldForce added:
“If we can call for russians to oppose putin, we can and must oppose trump no less.”
On April 6, federal authorities say Allen used his phone to search “white house correspondents dinner 2026” and booked a room at the Washington Hilton.
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’ dinner was scheduled two nights later.
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.
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 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.
Secret Service agents respond during the White House correspondents’ dinner.
(Tom Brenner / Associated Press)
A Secret Service officer saw him and fired five shots — all of which missed him — and Allen fell to the ground and was arrested before he could reach the event space. The Department of Justice has said it is investigating whether Allen fired the round that hit one of the agents in the chest; the agent avoided major injuries because he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
People who knew Allen before he was accused of attempting to gun down American leaders told The Times that they never would have thought he was capable of such a violent act.
Terlinden, of the Caltech Christian Fellowship, said she and Allen once got into a heated argument over how to spend the group’s charity money. He advocated for sending toys to children abroad through an organization that was explicitly Christian, whereas Terlinden pushed to feed the homeless locally, which she thought was more pragmatic.
“I think he said it’s not about helping people, it’s about showing the love of Christ,” she recalled. “After I talked about efficiency and helping people.”
She left the room and didn’t return.
“Part of the reason I’m bringing that up is to demonstrate that that’s the most scandalous incident I could come up with,” Terlinden said. “We were arguing over whether we should send toys to poor children or feed homeless people — that’s the big tea.”
Reflecting on the allegations, she said she wondered whether Allen was “acting out of perceived moral duty. … In a twisted way, there is a sense of, you know, standing up for people that can’t defend themselves.”
The high-speed rail tunnel extends as far down the mountains as some of the deepest mines on the planet
One of the first trains that crossed the world’s longest rail tunnel(Image: FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)
Nothing stands in the way quite like Europe’s highest and most extensive mountain range. With France on one end and Austria the other, the Alps sprawl 1,200km across eight countries in a massive crescent shape.
Historically, Alpine crossings were perilous journeys taken on foot or mule. For as long as people have been in Europe, they have sought to cross this mountain range so vital for travel, trade and war.
The Romans fought battles to control routes through the Alps. Historic figures, including Hannibal — with elephants in tow — then later Napoleon, led armies over the mountains to gain a strategic wartime advantage.
They’d have wished for something like the Gotthard Base Tunnel, a corridor between northern and southern Europe that opened in 2016. At the cost of about £11.5bn, it is the longest and deepest tunnel ever built.
It’s a crucial link for travel as well as the transport of goods across Europe. Used by freight and passenger trains, it cuts travel time from Basel to Zurich and Milan to Lugano by up to an hour.
The Gotthard tunnel extends 57km — a 20 minute journey underneath the majestic Alps that loom above. Remarkably, its depth of 2.3km is comparable to some of the deepest mines in the planet.
Trains are able to zip through at a maximum speed of 155mph due to their clever design.
Where older tunnels spiral their way up the mountains, the Gotthard is completely flat. It’s the first flat route through the Alps or any other mountain range.
As the world’s longest tunnel, it bypasses the Channel Tunnel running between England and France by 7km.
It beat out the previous world record holder, Japan’s Seikan rail tunnel, by 3km. The Seikan tunnel connects the country’s two largest islands, Honshu and Hokkaido.
The tunnel was created to replace the first Gotthardbahn rail tunnel, an engineering marvel of its time that was completed in 1882.
Plans for its replacement began a century later in the 1980s. It was an ambitious and arduous project that took 17 years to build.
With 35 miles of mountain pressing down on the route, one of the critical challenges was how to prevent the tunnel from collapsing in on itself. Fortunately, reinforced steel rings spanning the tunnel support the weight of the mountain above.
The project required the use of a massive drill the length of four football fields. At 410m long and 10m wide, it carved through 40m of mountain a day.
Lainey Wilson didn’t seem too worried about the high winds that temporarily shut down Stagecoach on Saturday night.
Headlining the festival’s main stage after an hour-long delay — during which fans were ordered to evacuate Indio’s Empire Polo Club before being allowed back in — Wilson looked out at the crowd in front of her and said of the unplanned break: “I hope y’all sat in your cars and drank some tequila.”
Lainey Wilson performs.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The whoops across the field suggested that might’ve been what happened.
Only the third woman to headline Stagecoach in the past five years, Wilson offered a tight, punchy showcase of the riff-heavy country-rock that’s made her one of Nashville’s biggest stars (after a decade-long come-up in which she’s said she lived in a camper trailer).
“Can’t Sit Still” and “Wildflowers and Wild Horses” were swaggering and Stones-y; “Country’s Cool Again” rode a funky down-home groove. To fill the big stage — it evoked a kind of desert oasis with a glittering horseshoe and a couple of prop cacti — Wilson brought along a horn section and background singers who turned “Dreamcatcher” into a psychedelic roots-soul fantasia.
Not long into the show, Wilson welcomed Little Big Town and Riley Green for an appealingly sloppy rendition — complete with drinks in plastic cups — of Merle Haggard’s “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink.” Then she let Green, whose scheduled performance was scotched because of the wind, stick around to do his “I Wish Grandpas Never Died.” (Also called off Saturday was Journey’s set on the Mustang stage.)
Wilson’s only other guest was the little girl she ushered onstage and pronounced “cowgirl of the night” during “Things a Man Oughta Know.” After that came the singer’s dreamiest hit, “Somewhere Over Laredo,” and an especially sultry take on “Watermelon Moonshine,” the nostalgia-drunk love song from 2023 that’s probably still her finest moment.
History textbooks often include the story of the Underground Railroad, an organized network of secret routes, places and people that guided enslaved populations from the South to abolitionist Northern states.
However, less is known about the underground railroad that ran southbound to Mexico. But one live-looped musical is unearthing that hidden history, one beat at a time.
Co-created and performed by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, “Mexodus” tells the fictional story of Henry, who evades his capture by fleeing Texas across the Rio Grande. After a near fatality, he is saved by Carlos, a farmer and former combat medic battling his own trauma from the Mexican-American War. Together they form solidarity, despite social, racial and political strains plaguing both sides of the border.
Following its off-Broadway run at the Daryl Roth Theatre in New York City, the hip-hop and bolero-infused musical directed by David Mendizábal will open at the Pasadena Playhouse stage July 8 and run until Aug. 2. But for history buffs and musical enthusiasts alike, a sonically richer version filled with sound effects of the musical airs exclusively on Audible today, April 16.
The idea for “Mexodus” first came to Brian Quijada — playwright, actor and composer behind “Where Did We Sit on the Bus?,” “Kid Prince and Pablo” and “Somewhere Over the Border” — when reading a 2018 article on History.com about the estimated 5,000 to 10,000 enslaved individuals that escaped the American South for freedom in Mexico, though some researchers estimate that number to be higher.
“My parents crossed the border undocumented in the late 1970s, so I think I’ve always been fascinated with writing immigration stories,” Quijada said. “The reason that this story attracted me was because it’s like a reverse border story, but I also knew that it wasn’t my story to tell so I sat on it for a long time.”
Quijada bookmarked the article until he met Robinson — a performer at Berkeley Rep, Baltimore Center Stage, Shakespeare Theater Company, Mosaic Theater and writer and composer of “Santa Claus Is Comin’: A Motown Christmas Revue” and “R&J: Fire on the Bayou” — at an actor-musician conference weeks before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were the only actors-musicians of color in the room, listening in on conversations about how one should audition for musicals like “Once,” “Million Dollar Quartet,” which typically center white storylines.
“We kind of looked at each other and we’re like, ‘we don’t really belong here,’” said Quijada, who invited Robinson to take part in “Mexodus” during the pandemic shutdown. The first iteration of the project was as a mixtape.
The musical edge of “Mexodus” hinges on live looping, a recording and playback technique where a sound is repeated and then layered (think Justin Bieber’s solo performance of “Yukon” at the 2026 Grammy Awards). Physically, both Quijada and Robinson’s characters have to pick up a guitar, record it, then play the drum set and run to the bass. “ It’s pretty labor-intensive,” Quijada said.
“I think Brian and I are artists in this way, like various people of color, where it’s like, no one else is gonna do it for me, so I can do it all by myself,” Robinson said.
There’s also a more dramaturgical, meta reason for the loop, which follows a four chord structure throughout the piece, set in both 1851 and present day.
“The looping shows you that there’s not much difference between 1851 and 2026,” Robinson said. “We just keep finding ourselves in a loop and like maybe a sound is in that wasn’t there before. Maybe another sound is added, but it’s still the same four chord structure that has been happening in this country for all existence.”
In 2010, the U.S. National Park Service outlined a possible runaway route stretching on the Camino Real de la Tejas between Natchitoches, La., to Monclova, Mexico. Still, it is unclear how organized the underground railroad heading to Mexico truly was, the Associated Press reported in 2020, with archives destroyed in a fire and sites along the path abandoned.
In 2024 the Jackson Ranch Church and Martin Jackson Cemetery in San Juan, Texas — which are part of a ranch owned by interracial couple Nathaniel Jackson and Matilda Hicks — were recognized by the U.S. National Park Service for serving as a gateway to freedom in Mexico.
Other Texas couples alongside the border— including interracial abolitionist couple Ferdinand Webber and Silvia Hector — aided enslaved people in their pursuits to reach Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1829, while Texas was still part of the country.
Fears surrounding the Mexican government’s attempts to abolish slavery led to the formation of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and its eventual annexation to the United States by 1845; records also show that American slave owners would head down to Mexico to kidnap formerly enslaved individuals, according to USC historian Alice Baumgartner, who wrote about it in her 2020 book “South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War.”
A database by the Texas Runaway Slave Project, which found listings for 2,500 runaways across various Texas newspapers from the 1840s through the 1860s, also documents the frequented journey to Mexico.
Slavery in the U.S. wouldn’t be officially abolished until 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
“I was also really intimidated by the amount of research that I would have to do to write this piece because at the time back [between 2017 and 2020], [researchers] were just beginning to uncover a lot of this,” Quijada said.
Themes of racism — including anti-Blackness in the Latino community — oppression and resistance are woven throughout “Mexodus,” which since its debut in 2023 at the Baltimore Center Stage/Mosaic Theater Company in Washington, D.C., has been making viewers aware of the little-known history.
Robinson recalled how one Black woman came up to him after the show to let him know she believed in Trump’s border wall.
“I got nervous, but she was like, ‘after seeing this, I’m realizing that there’s something trying to convince me of that.’ And I’m like, yes!” said Robinson. “I’m like, this is good. This is good. We started you somewhere. Wow.”
The pair hope that amid all the dark news circulating around the world — and the traumatic, historical themes interlaced in “Mexodus” — the existence of this piece of art can be a glimmer of hope and joy for the future of both Black and brown communities.
“ I need you all to see the truth, but we’re gonna try and dance anyway,” Robinson said.
