Who is the suspect?
Trump shared photos of the suspected shooter, shirtless and in handcuffs facedown on a carpeted floor, in what appears to be the Hilton lobby.
Authorities are yet to publicly confirm his identity, but multiple US news outlets reported that the suspect was a 31-year-old named Cole Tomas Allen from Torrance, California.
FBI agents were seen outside a two-story residence in Torrance late Saturday, according to an AFP photographer.
“My impression is he was a lone wolf,” Trump said, adding that the suspect’s motivation was not yet clear but he believed the gunman was “sick.”
A LinkedIn profile with the name “Cole Allen” showed a picture of a man which appeared to match a photo of the suspect shared by Trump.
The social media profile said Allen was a mechanical engineer, computer scientist, game developer and teacher.
A person named Cole Allen graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 2017 with an undergraduate degree, the university told the New York Times.
C2 Education, a test-prep company, named Allen as “teacher of the month” in an Instagram post dated December 2024.
Were there security failures?
Questions swirled regarding the security at the reception and how a gun was brought into the hotel.
Attendees pointed out that there was a magnetometer placed outside the ballroom, but there was no such screening before that or at the entrance to the hotel itself.
Trump initially said it was “not a particularly secure building,” but later said the ballroom where the event was being held was not breached by the gunman and was “very, very secure.”
The checkpoint that the suspect tried to charge past was “right outside the ballroom,” authorities said.
“Because that checkpoint worked, there was no one who was injured,” Pirro said.
“We’ll go through video across the hotel to figure out how the gun got in, how it got down here,” Carroll added.
According to Trump, the security services did a “much better job than Butler,” where he was the target of an assassination attempt in 2024 during a campaign rally in the state of Pennsylvania.
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