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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Sunday the preliminary investigation indicated that the gunman acted alone and set out from his home in California last week before arriving in D.C. and checking into the Hilton on Friday with two firearms and a knife he had purchased years before. So far, the suspect had refused to cooperate with investigators, Blanche said. But interviews with family members as well as writings recovered from Allen’s home outside Los Angeles and the hotel room he booked at the Washington Hilton contributed to a growing confidence among authorities that his attack was politically motivated. (Roebuck, Stein, Kirkpatrick and Davies, 4/26)

Caltech. Cal State Dominguez Hills. Teacher of the month. Torrance. Cole Tomas Allen, the man arrested Saturday, April 25, in the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner, appears to have left a trail through Southern California higher education on his alleged path to Washington, D.C. That trail, according to interviews and social media posts, shows a 31-year-old, highly educated tutor and amateur video game developer from Torrance who studied at one of the most elite learning institutions in the world, Caltech. (Carter, Emery, Saavedra and Armstrong, 4/26)

President Donald Trump lashed out at CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell in an interview Sunday for quoting from the manifesto of the suspected gunman who tried to storm the White House Correspondents Dinner less than 24 hours earlier. ... When O’Donnell, during an interview recorded at the White House on Sunday, quoted from the accused gunman Cole Allen’s apparent manifesto — “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” she read — Trump, who’d been relatively subdued in his responses, flashed a familiar anger. “I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people. Horrible people,” Trump said. “Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.” O’Donnell interjected, “Oh, do you think he was referring to you?” But the president blew past her question, declaring, “I’m not a pedophile.” (Stokols, 4/26)

When so many officials gather in one place for official functions such as an inauguration or State of the Union address, the secretary of homeland security typically puts the Secret Service in charge of coordinating all security through a formal designation known as a “National Special Security Event.” There was no such designation on Saturday night at an event also attended by thousands of journalists and other government officials, according to local and federal officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss security details. ... A worst-case scenario might have resulted in passing the power of the presidency to the senior-most senator of the majority party, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who was not at the event and is third in line to the presidency behind Vance and Johnson. (Davies, Arnsdorf, Roebuck and Heim, 4/26)

The gunman who sprinted through a security checkpoint on Saturday night at the Washington Hilton believed that the Secret Service was poorly prepared to guard top administration officials against him, according to writing he left behind. Agents, in turn, stopped him in a matter of seconds. The episode raised fresh questions about whether the Secret Service was sufficiently prepared to protect the president in an age of rising threats and spasms of political violence. But officials insisted that the security measures had worked as intended, pointing to the fact that the suspect never made it into the hotel ballroom where President Trump and hundreds of journalists were gathered for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. (Barrett, Sullivan and Marcius, 4/26)

A Chicago officer who was fatally shot by a man receiving treatment at a hospital while in police custody has been identified as 38-year-old John Bartholomew, authorities said. Bartholomew, a 10-year veteran of the force, was pronounced dead just before 1 p.m. Saturday after being shot at Endeavor Health Swedish Hospital, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. A second officer was wounded in the Saturday morning shooting and remained in critical condition Sunday, police said. (4/26)

Jason Smith remembers the moment when things started to change for him, just as he was flying home to Alabama from the funeral of a former Marine colleague. It was April 2017. His friend Master Sgt. John Drascula, a decorated 24-year veteran with tours in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, had died by suicide in late March. Now Smith is the director of Veterans Programs at Florida Springs Wellness and Recovery Center in Panama City, Fla., working with veterans dealing with the effects of substance abuse, post-traumatic stress and other issues. He is also a coordinator for Safer Together, a program in Alabama focused on bringing down the number of people who die by suicide using firearms, a problem that observers agree has reached unconscionable levels. (Thornton, 4/26)

The Shreveport, La., slaying of eight children was an example of what experts call family annihilation. (Morales, 4/24)

After violent crime worsened alongside Covid-19, the federal government passed legislation including hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for community violence interventions. Community leaders and experts on crime nationwide gave some credit to these programs for helping bring homicides to historic lows in the years since. But the Trump administration withheld much of this funding upon taking office in 2025, leaving many programs scrambling to find alternative sources of support and community leaders uncertain if they can sustain the progress. (Colon, 4/25)