WASHINGTON — Erin Thielman was making a phone call to her son, stepping away from the bustling scene of the Washington Hilton’s ballroom, when the unexpected sound of gunfire shattered the evening. She found herself witnessing the Secret Service’s swift response to a gunman at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Thielman, an Air Force veteran present as a guest of the Wall Street Journal alongside her husband Jason, was positioned just beyond the security barrier when Cole Allen, the alleged assailant, made his bold attempt to breach the perimeter.
Recalling the intense moment, Thielman shared with The Post, “Just as my son picked up the call, I greeted him with ‘Hey, bud,’ and immediately heard three loud bangs. Realizing they were gunshots, I glanced to my left and saw Secret Service agents with their pistols drawn, likely having just fired.”
The suspect, identified as 31-year-old Cole Allen, was taken down mere feet away from Thielman. “He was right in front of me, only a foot away,” she described. “He fell face-first, hands extended in front of him.”
Feeling the urgency of the situation, she added, “I got the hell out of there.”
In response to the unfolding events, The Post reached out to the Secret Service for confirmation on whether shots were indeed fired by their agents during the incident.
Thielman is a disabled veteran who suffers from knee and shoulder issues, especially on stairs. The security perimeter to get into the ballroom was up a level from the chamber itself. She had gone up to that floor to get a better reception.
“I saw him running right before,” she said of the suspect before the Secret Service took him down. “He wore magazines similar to how a woman will wear a cross-body bag with bullets in it. And he looked of the determination and ‘oh, sh—’ all at the same time. And then he fell right in front of me.”
After witnessing the terrifying security scare, she scrambled back to meet her husband, reflecting, “It’s a miracle I could run down the stairs.”
“I’m a veteran. I’ve seen war, and it was reminiscent,” she noted.
Once she scrambled down a flight of steps to get to the ballroom, she yelled, “gun, gun, shooter, shooter,” and urged security to shut the doors.
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She was then yanked under a table and realized that her son, who was babysitting his younger siblings, had been on the line with her the whole time until losing reception again in the ballroom area.
Both Erin and her husband, Jason, who is a founding partner at S2R Public Affairs, reconnected, and she was determined to stay.
“I was like, if we leave, this a–hole wins. I said we’re staying put. So we stayed put until the Secret Service told us we had to leave,” she recounted.
The crazed gunman had traveled from California and booked a hotel room at the Washington Hilton, according to officials. He was allegedly armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives.
Allen, who got a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, is set to be arraigned on Monday and faces two counts of wielding a firearm during a crime of violence and a charge of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.
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In his manifesto, the alleged shooter billed himself as a “Friendly Federal Assassin” and described his objective as targeting administration officials, except FBI Director Kash Patel, “from highest-ranking to lowest.”
“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” he allegedly wrote in his manifesto.
Thielman is grateful that no one was killed. Only one Secret Service officer suffered a minor injury from taking a shot to their bulletproof vest.
“The President touched on this himself, but the unity before the shooting happened … was amazing. But even after the fact, people stopped blaming parties, and they were just all people trying to survive and get out,” she recalled.
“The politics melted away, and we were all just humans trying to survive the night.”
