Confrontation between authorities and alleged correspondents' dinner shooter lasted 7 seconds

Shortly after 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, an alleged assassin burst through a set of double doors one floor above a ballroom where President Trump and roughly 2,600 other White House Correspondents' Dinner guests were eating a salad course. Seven seconds later, he was apprehended by federal law enforcement, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News. After Cole Allen, the 31-year-old alleged assailant, used an interior stairwell to descend from his tenth-floor room at the Washington Hilton Hotel, he arrived at an elevator bank on the terrace level with a set of double doors to his left. There, in a hallway out of view of security cameras, he removed a jacket that had concealed a shotgun, law enforcement officials told CBS News. Authorities found the jacket there later, the sources said. What followed was a rapid chain of events. A K-9 unit exited a security checkpoint through the double doors. Two seconds later, Allen came through the doors, turned left and — in another two seconds — sprinted through a magnetometer the U.S. Secret Service had been in the process of disassembling. Prosecutors say this image from surveillance video shows Cole Allen running with a shotgun outside the White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 25, 2026. U.S. Department of Justice Two seconds after that, gunfire rang out. Secret Service Director Sean Curran said Thursday that from the evidence he had seen, the suspect shot at a uniformed officer. …