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Newly unearthed video shows a different side of the gunman authorities say tried to blast his way into the press dinner to kill President Donald Trump.
In the decade-old video obtained by Fox News Digita, Cole Allen, now 31, presents his invention at an “Aging into the Future” conference co-sponsored by St. Barnabas Senior Services in Los Angeles. Surrounded by fellow innovators, he demonstrated a prototype emergency brake for wheelchairs — a device he assembled using basic PVC piping. The contraption was notably simple, engineering experts told Fox News Digital, and didn’t reflect particularly advanced mechanical engineering for a graduating senior at Caltech.
Still, the video provides a sharp contrast in the life of an angry radical accused of trying to barrel through the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue NW in a shocking assassination plot allegedly targeting Trump administration officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
The video chronicles a very different person compared to the portrait emerging from law enforcement interviews with Allen’s brother and sister and his own writings in a manifesto.
Speaking about past assassination plots, Trump told Fox News on Sunday, “You know, these assassins, they seem to be high IQ people, but they’re crazy.”
The FBI has now identified Allen as the suspect in the shooting Saturday night at the Washington Hilton, with his brother reporting to law enforcement authorities that Allen’s manifesto detailed allegedly deadly plans at the weekend gathering for journalists and administration officials.
Trump told Fox News, “The guy is a sick guy. When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians. That’s one thing for sure. He hates Christians, a hatred.”
Trump said Allen’s family raised alarm bells with law enforcement.
“He was a very troubled guy,” he said, later also calling him “disturbed.”
According to law enforcement officials, Allen also descended into anti-Trump hate, attending at least one of the three “No Kings” protests organized over the past year by groups including Democratic-leaning nonprofits, like Indivisible, MoveOn and American Federation of Teachers, and a network of socialist organizations, including the People’s Forum, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the ANSWER Coalition, funded by an American tech tycoon, Neville Roy Singham, living in Shanghai.
WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER SUSPECT CHECKED INTO HILTON HOTEL ONE DAY BEFORE THE SHOOTING: SOURCES
Almost a decade ago, Allen appeared to have very different priorities.
In a news segment published in March 2017 by WABC in Los Angeles, Allen appears as a disciplined student at the California Institute of Technology, an elite institution known for admitting students with near-perfect test scores and training top-tier engineers and scientists.
Speaking in a measured tone with flat affect, Allen walked a reporter through the mechanics of his device, explaining how it could stabilize a wheelchair and prevent it from skidding. “The wheelchair brakes tend to lock the wheels but don’t actually lock the chair to the ground,” he explained.
WHO IS COLE ALLEN? CALIFORNIA MAN NAMED AS SUSPECT IN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER SHOOTING
Kneeling beside the wheels of a wheelchair and fiddling with an assembly of QVC pipes between the wheels, he continued, “The deal with this is to prevent it from moving at all.”
That year, Allen earned a mechanical engineering degree. While in college, he completed a competitive summer research fellowship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, contributing to astrophysics work, according to his LInkedIn profile. He also developed technical projects, including a physics-based role-playing shooter game called “First Law,” as well as robotic systems and later another game, “Bohrdom,” released on the Steam platform. Gaming experts said his “Bohrdom” game was very basic in its technical level.
After Caltech, Allen held down a job for only about a year before starting work as a tutor with C2 Education in 2020 and going on to earn a master’s degree in computer science from California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 2025. C2 Education recognized Allen a “teacher of the month” in late 2024, according to a social media post.
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Records also show a small political donation during the 2024 election cycle to the Kamala Harris presidential race.
Allen now faces federal charges including using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer, with additional charges expected.
Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich, Bill Melugin and Matt Finn, and Fox News Digital’s Jesse Watson, Stephen Sorace, Amanda Macias and contributed to this report.
