Caiaphas at the Hilton: The Friendly Federal Assassin and the Return of Human Sacrifice

by Tim Rosenberger

I.

Cole Tomas Allen, the young man who walked into the Washington Hilton on Saturday night with a shotgun, a handgun, multiple knives, and a stated intention to kill the president of the United States, gave a charming interview to ABC7 in Los Angeles in 2017. He was a Caltech senior studying mechanical engineering. He had designed a prototype emergency brake to keep wheelchairs from skidding when their wheel brakes engaged. The reporter found him gracious and articulate. The brake worked.

In the almost decade between his star turns, Allen took a master’s in computer science at Cal State Dominguez Hills, tutored high school students at C2 Education in Torrance, and was named the company’s Teacher of the Month in December 2024. The parents of his students told the Los Angeles Times he was intelligent, soft-spoken, and on the nicer side. His professor at Cal State remembered him in the front row, attentive, polite, and frequently emailing about coursework. On Saturday night, having traveled by train from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, he sent his family a note ten minutes before the attack. He apologized to those whose trust he had abused. He said he did not expect forgiveness. In the writings he left behind, he called himself the “Friendly Federal Assassin.”

How does the boy who built a wheelchair brake become the assassin at the magnetometer? The reporters covering the case have proposed mental illness, online radicalization, isolation. None of these answers is wrong. None is sufficient. They describe the surface, but the deeper architecture demands our attention.

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