Investigators Offer More Details of Gunman of Gala Dinner Attack

WASHINGTON -- Prosecutors offered new details Wednesday about the chaotic events outside a gala dinner for White House officials, where a gunman raced through a security checkpoint and was tackled by the police.

The suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, was charged Monday with trying to assassinate President Donald Trump when he sprinted with a shotgun, a handgun and multiple knives toward the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton on Saturday.

Video of the episode showed him running through a magnetometer before Secret Service agents fired in his direction and tackled him. He was brought down and disarmed at the top of a staircase leading down to the floor where the event was being held.

In a court filing submitted before a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday, Justice Department officials argued that the defendant should remain behind bars while he awaited trial. They said he had fired a shotgun toward the staircase while a Secret Service agent fired at him.

A Secret Service officer “observed the defendant fire the shotgun in the direction of the stairs leading down to the ballroom,” the court filing said.

The officer, as well as others at the checkpoint, “heard the gunshot,” prosecutors said, noting that the officer “drew his service weapon and fired five times at the defendant.”

“The defendant fell to the ground, was restrained by law enforcement and was placed under arrest,” the court filing said. “The defendant suffered a minor injury to his knee but was not shot.”

Officials have said the officer who fired his weapon was struck by a bullet in his protective vest. The chain of events is still not entirely clear, but the new details, combined with video, seem to suggest that the gunman was not the person who fired the round that struck the officer’s vest.

When agents took the shotgun, a Mossberg 12-gauge pump-action weapon, from the suspect, they found a spent shell in the barrel, as well as eight unfired cartridges in the weapon, the document said.

The court filing also included a photograph the defendant took of himself in his hotel room minutes before the attack. The image of Allen, who was wearing a black dress shirt, black pants and a red tie tucked into his waistband, showed that he had at least one knife strapped to his body, as well as a leather bag with ammunition.

Prosecutors said that shortly after taking the photograph, the defendant visited a number of webpages to get up-to-date information on the president’s presence at the dinner. Around 8:30, he went down to the terrace level of the hotel, where he ran through a security checkpoint.

“This was a planned attack of unfathomable malice that risked the lives of hundreds of people whose only transgression was attending an annual event celebrating the media and featuring the president of the United States,” prosecutors wrote in the filing. “It was, at its core, an anti-democratic act of political violence.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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