Stop.
Before you hear a single word from Sarah Brennan, listen to this.
Four nights ago, the man with bare feet walked into Sarah’s kitchen, sat in the chair where Cole Allen used to sit, and said one thing to her.
Tell it.
Don’t let it die inside you.
Other people need to hear this.
Sarah is going to tell it to you now, but she is going to tell it somewhere else, too.
She is sending her story to the Real Encounters Archive.
A hundred people did this before her.
A hundred testimonies became edition one.
Sarah goes into the next one.
If you have ever opened a door at the worst hour of your worst night and asked who is standing out there, that story belongs in the archive, too.
Three sentences are enough to start.
Three places to send it right now.
The link in the description, the link in the pinned comment, the QR code on this screen.
Point your phone at it now.
Do not wait for the video to end.
Send it while the door is still open for you.
My name is Sarah Brennan.
I was born on March 14th, 1998 in Long Beach, California.
The only daughter of Patrick and Maureen Brennan, both Irish-American, both raised Catholic, both of whom raised me Catholic.
My father was a longshoreman at the Port of Long Beach for 31 years.
He passed in November of 2019 from pancreatic cancer, 3 months after the diagnosis, 2 days after my 21st birthday.
My mother lives now in a small house on Carson Street in Lakewood, 12 minutes from my apartment.
She has been a widow for 6 and 1/2 years.
I was baptized at St.
Lucy’s Catholic Church in Long Beach in May of 1998.
I made my first communion at St.
Lucy’s in 2007.
I was confirmed at St.
Lucy’s in May of 2013.
I have not received the sacraments since the spring of 2017, the second semester of my freshman year at Cal State Long Beach.
When I made the decision, quietly, alone, without telling anyone, that the kind of faith my mother carried was not the kind of faith I wanted to carry, and I stopped going to mass.
I never told my mother.
She has continued to ask every Christmas Eve for nine consecutive years if I would like to come with her to the 7:00 vigil at St.
Lucy’s.
For nine Christmases, I have said, “Maybe next year.
” None of those years did I say yes.
I teach fourth grade English at Roosevelt Elementary School in Long Beach.
I have 18 students this year.
I have been at Roosevelt for 5 years.
I run the science fair every October.
That detail is going to matter in a moment.
Today is Wednesday, April 29th, 2026.
It is 10:00 in the morning, Pacific time.
It has been 96 hours since I learned from a Chiron on my mother’s muted television that the man I once loved tried to assassinate the President of the United States.
My principal, a woman named Diane Vasquez, who has been a friend to me since I started, called me at 7:15 a.
m.
on Monday morning, April 27th.
She had seen the news.
She told me to take the week off.
She said, “Sarah, do not try to come back until you are ready.
” I am still at home.
I am alone.
The FBI came to my apartment on Sunday afternoon, April 26th at 2:30 p.
m.
Two agents, both in their 40s, both very kind.
They asked me questions for 2 hours and 11 minutes.
I made them coffee.
I answered every question.
I told them everything I am going to tell you in this video with one exception.
I did not tell them about the door.
The door was not theirs.
I am telling you about the door now because the man at the door told me to tell.
I met Cole Thomas Allen on Friday, October 22nd, 2021 at the annual fall science fair at Roosevelt Elementary School in Long Beach.
I had been teaching at Roosevelt for less than 2 months.
I was 23 years old.
I had volunteered to coordinate the science fair because I was the new teacher and the new teacher gets the volunteer assignments.
Cole was 26.
He was a part-time tutor at C2 Education in Torrance, 20 miles up the 405 Freeway.
C2 had partnered with the Long Beach Unified School District that fall to send Caltech-trained tutors and engineers into Title 1 schools to run STEM workshops for underprivileged kids.
Cole had volunteered to run a robotics demonstration.
He had brought a small LEGO Mindstorms robot that he had built himself.
He had built the maze, too.
He spent 6 hours that Friday afternoon kneeling on a hard linoleum floor explaining gear ratios to 9-year-olds.
The children loved him.
I want to be very clear about this because the world is going to spend the next 10 years describing Cole as a monster.
And that is one true thing about who he became.
But on October 22nd, 2021 Cole was not yet who he became.
He was patient.
He was kind.
He was the kind of man who knelt on a hard floor for 6 hours so that 9-year-olds whose families could not afford a robotics camp could understand how a robot worked.
I introduced myself at 4:15 p.
m.
I said, “You were great with them.
” He said, “I love this.
I should have been a teacher instead of an engineer.
” I said, “It is not too late.
” He smiled.
He had a small space between his front teeth.
He had brown hair that fell into his eyes the way the brown hair of every Caltech kid I had ever met fell into their eyes.
He had a faded gray Caltech sweatshirt and a single thin silver chain at his neck.
A Saint Christopher medal his father had given him on his confirmation in 2010 that he had not taken off in 11 years.
That he was still wearing in the Truth Social photograph the president posted on Saturday night.
He asked me out for coffee.
We met at 7:30 p.
m.
at the library coffee house in Belmont Shore.
We talked for 4 hours.
He told me he was working on a video game called Boredom.
He told me his father had passed away when Cole was 16 and he had not really talked about it since.
He told me he had been a member of the Caltech Christian Fellowship as an undergraduate but he had stopped going after his father died.
He told me he had been alone for a long time.
I told him I was Catholic by birth and lapsed by choice.
He laughed.
He said, “Maybe we will figure something out together.
” We started dating that night.
We dated for 3 years and 3 months from October 22nd, 2021 to January 14th, 2025.
He met my mother for the first time on Sunday, December 12th, 2021 at her house in Lakewood.
He brought her yellow roses, which were her favorite, which I had told him on our second date were her favorite, and which he had remembered.
My mother loved him from the first dinner.
We moved in together in May of 2023, four blocks from the Pacific Ocean, in a two-bedroom apartment on Locust Avenue in Long Beach.
We were poor.
We were happy.
I was 25 and he was 28.
We talked about being engaged in 2025.
We picked out a ring at a small shop in Belmont Shore in November of 2024, 6 weeks before I broke up with him.
I want you to understand who he was when I met him, because the world is going to spend the next 10 years describing the man who fired a shotgun at a Secret Service officer at 5:36 p.
m.
Pacific time on Saturday, April 25th, 2026.
That man is real.
I am not going to defend him.
But that man is not the only man Cole was.
There was another Cole before there was that one.
There was the Cole I loved.
The man I met in October 2021 was kind.
He was patient.
He was funny in a quiet, dry way.
He read books to me on Sunday afternoons, actual books, out loud, sitting on the small couch in our living room on Locust Avenue.
He brought me a coffee at 6:00 a.
m.
on the days I had to be at Roosevelt early.
He was good with my mother.
He came to her house in Lakewood for dinner every Sunday for 2 years.
He learned how to ask about my father in a way that did not make me cry.
He once said to her on a Sunday evening in March of 2023, “Maureen, I would have liked to meet him.
I think you would have liked me.
My mother had cried at that.
So had I.
The change started in the summer of 2024.
I am being precise about this because I have been asked to be precise about it.
The first time I noticed something was different was the night of June 27th, 2024.
The night of the first Trump-Biden debate.
Cole watched the debate on his laptop.
I was grading papers at the kitchen table.
He was completely silent through 90 minutes.
When the debate ended, he closed the laptop.
He stood up.
He walked to the kitchen window.
He turned around and he said one sentence.
This country is going to elect a fascist in November.
He said it the way I had heard him say things before.
Calm, technical, certain.
But there was something underneath that I had not heard before.
There was a coldness.
There was a decision.
The change was slow but constant from June through November of 2024.
He stopped sleeping properly.
He started waking up at 3:00 a.
m.
and sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop.
He stopped reading me books on Sunday afternoons.
He stopped coming to my mother’s house every Sunday.
First, every other Sunday, then once a month, and then by November, he had stopped coming at all.
My mother asked me twice in October if everything was okay.
The first time I said yes.
The second time, on October 28th, I said, “I do not know.
” He started spending more time at the shooting range.
He had been a casual member of a range in Compton for 3 years.
He went maybe once every 2 months.
Starting in August of 2024, he started going twice a week.
He had bought a second-hand gun in October of 2023, when there had been break-ins in our neighborhood.
In August of 2025, and the world is going to find this fact, because the gun store kept records, he bought a black Mossberg 500 shotgun.
He told me at the time it was for self-defense because he had been receiving threats online for some posts he had been making.
He had been making more and more posts.
He was angry at Christians in particular.
Angry at evangelicals who supported Trump.
Angry at the Catholic Church for what he called its complicity.
Angry in a way that was new and that did not soften over time.
The Mossberg he bought in August of 2025 is the same shotgun he carried into the lobby of the Washington Hilton at 5:36 p.
m.
Pacific time on Saturday.
On the night of September 18th, 2024, a Wednesday, he came home from the shooting range at 9:30 p.
m.
I was in the kitchen making dinner.
He walked past me without saying hello.
He went to a small wooden drawer below the silverware drawer, the drawer where I kept my grandmother’s rosary, which she had given me at my confirmation in May of 2013.
Cole opened the drawer.
He took out the rosary.
I asked him, “What are you doing?” He did not answer.
He walked into the living room.
He walked to the small fireplace in the corner, which still had warm embers from a fire the night before.
He threw the rosary into the embers.
He stood there and watched it burn.
He turned around.
He said, “You are not Catholic anymore, Sarah.
Stop pretending you are.
” Then he walked into the bedroom and closed the door.
I did not move.
I did not say anything.
I did not know what to say.
I waited until 11:30 p.
m.
when I knew Cole was asleep.
I put on an oven mitt.
I reached into the fireplace.
I picked the wooden cross of the rosary out of the ashes.
I rinsed it in the kitchen sink.
I dried it.
I put it in a small wooden box on my dresser.
The cross has been in that box for 19 months.
I am holding it in my left hand right now as I record this.
There is still soot on the back of it.
The wood is warped from the heat.
It is the cross my grandmother gave me on May 18th, 2013 when she was 73 years old 6 years before she died, 11 years before her grandson-in-law who would not be through her gift into a fire and stop pretending.
I broke up with Cole on Tuesday, January 14th, 2025, 6 days before President Trump was inaugurated for his second term.
I want to walk you through the sequence because it has been asked of me four times this week.
We had spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning of 2024 at my mother’s house in Lakewood.
Cole had been quiet through both.
He had not eaten more than half of his Christmas dinner.
We had spent Thursday, December 26th, 2024 at his mother’s house in Torrance.
His sister, who is 26 and who I will not name on this video to protect her, she is currently being asked questions she did not sign up for by every reporter in California, pulled me aside in his mother’s kitchen at 4:00 p.
m.
She said, “Sarah, is he okay?” He has not been okay.
I said, “I do not know.
” She said, “How long?” I said, “Since June.
” She said, “Has he seen anyone?” I said, “I have asked him to.
He says he is fine.
” She said, “He is not fine.
” I said, “I know.
” On New Year’s Eve, December 31st, 2024, Cole stayed home.
He told me to go out with my friends.
He said he had work to do.
I went to a small dinner party at the apartment of my friend Megan in Belmont Shore.
I left at 12:45 a.
m.
I drove home.
I was sober.
I arrived at our apartment on Locust Avenue at 1:00 a.
m.
on Wednesday, January 1st, 2025.
I unlocked the front door.
The apartment was dark except for the light of Cole’s laptop screen, which was illuminating his face from below.
He was sitting at the kitchen table.
He did not look up.
He was reading something.
He was making notes in the margin of whatever he was reading.
The screen was bright enough that I could see from across the room what was on the screen.
It was a PDF.
The title at the top of the page was Industrial Society and its future and the author was Theodore Kaczynski.
I knew who that was, the Unabomber.
I stood in the doorway for 10 seconds.
I said, “Cole.
” He did not look up.
I said, “Cole, what are you doing?” He said, “I am reading.
” He said it in a voice that did not invite a follow-up.
I went into the bedroom.
I closed the door.
I lay down in my clothes.
I did not sleep until 5:30 a.
m.
I did not bring up the Kaczynski manifesto in the morning.
I did not bring it up the next day.
I did not bring it up for 13 days.
I do not know why I did not bring it up.
The closest answer I have is this.
I was 26 years old and I did not yet know what to say to a man you have loved for 3 years and 3 months when you find him reading the manifesto of a domestic terrorist on the kitchen table at 1:00 a.
m.
on the first morning of a new year.
On Tuesday afternoon, January 14th, 2025, I came home from Roosevelt at 4:30 p.
m.
Cole was in the kitchen.
He was making spaghetti.
He had set the table.
He had lit a candle, which he had not done in 7 months.
I sat down across from him.
I did not eat.
I looked at him for 30 seconds.
Then I said, “I cannot do this anymore.
Whatever you are becoming, I cannot become it with you.
I love you.
I have always loved you.
But I am not safe in this kitchen tonight with the man you have become the way I was safe in this kitchen with the man I met in October 2021.
” He looked at me.
He was completely calm.
He had set down his fork.
He said, “I understand.
” That was all he said.
He did not argue.
He did not try to convince me.
He stood up.
He blew out the candle.
He walked into the bedroom.
I could hear him zipping a duffel bag.
He came back into the kitchen at 5:12 p.
m.
with two bags.
He stopped at the front door.
He turned around.
He said one more thing.
He said, “Sarah, I am sorry.
You did not do anything wrong.
I am the thing that is wrong.
” Then he walked out.
He drove to his mother’s house in Torrance.
He arrived there at 5:54 p.
m.
, his mother told the FBI later.
He did not call me.
He did not text me.
Two days later, on Thursday, January 16th, 2025 at 11:00 a.
m.
, I came home from Roosevelt during my lunch break.
There was a small white envelope under my front door.
The envelope had been pushed under the door, not slid through the mail slot.
Inside was my key, the one he had taken when he packed his bags, and a folded piece of paper.
The paper had nine words on it, written in his handwriting in blue ink.
“I am sorry.
I will not contact you again.
C.
” He kept his promise.
From January 16th, 2025 to April 25th, 2026, 464 days, he did not contact me once.
The note is still in the drawer where I put it on January 16th, 2025.
I took it out yesterday morning.
I read it again.
I put it back.
For 16 months, I did not see Cole.
I did not call him.
I did not write him.
He kept his promise.
I knew, through his sister, who reached out to me twice a year, once on my birthday in March and once around Christmas, that he had moved back into his mother’s house in Torrance.
That he had finished his master’s degree at Cal State Dominguez Hills in May of 2025.
That he was still teaching at C2 Education.
That he was, in his sister’s words, the same but more so.
I asked her on Christmas day of 2025 what that meant.
She said, “He is quieter.
He is sharper.
He spends more time alone.
He does not come to dinner anymore.
My mother does not know what to do.
” I said, “Has he seen anyone?” She said, “He says he is fine.
” I said, “I know.
” We were both quiet for a long time.
Then she said, “Sarah, I am sorry.
I do not know what to do.
” I said, “Neither do I.
” I dated one other man briefly in the fall of 2025.
It did not work.
I told him he was not Cole, and I cried for 3 days, and I broke it off on November 9th, 2025.
I started going to a therapist named Dr.
Linda Park with an office in Belmont Shore in March of 2025.
I have been seeing Dr.
Park every Thursday at 5:30 p.
m.
for 14 months.
I have not missed a session.
I told Dr.
Park in our session on Thursday afternoon, April 23rd, 2026, 2 days before what happened, that I had been having a recurring dream for the previous 6 weeks.
I had not told anyone else.
In the dream, Cole was standing in a hotel lobby with marble floors.
He was wearing a dark coat that was not his coat.
He was holding something that was long and dark.
I could not tell what it was.
And he was holding it with both hands, the way a man holds a tool he intends to use.
The lobby had high ceilings.
There were chandeliers.
There were men in dark suits running toward him.
Cole was looking directly at me.
He was not afraid.
He was calm.
The dream always ended at the same moment.
The men in dark suits would reach him, and just before one of their hands made contact, I would wake up.
I had the dream eight times between March 11th and April 21st, 2026.
I told Dr.
Park about it on April 23rd.
I said, “I think it means I still love him and I am scared for him.
” Dr.
Park looked at me for a long time.
She said, “It might mean that, Sarah, or it might mean something else.
” I said, “What else could it mean?” She said, “I am not the right person to answer that question.
There are some dreams that do not yet have words.
” That session ended at 6:20 p.
m.
on Thursday, April 23rd, 2026.
46 hours later, on Saturday evening at 5:42 p.
m.
Pacific time, the dream became television.
On Saturday, April 25th, 2026, I drove to my mother’s house in Lakewood at 4:00 p.
m.
The drive is 12 minutes.
We were having dinner, pot roast.
My mother makes pot roast on Saturdays the way her mother did, the way her mother’s mother did.
We had been talking about my job, about my therapist, about a small remodeling project my mother was doing in her downstairs bathroom.
The television was on in the living room behind us.
CNN was muted.
We had been ignoring it.
CNN had been muted at my mother’s house since 2017 when she had decided that the noise was not good for her.
She left it on for the chyrons.
At 5:42 p.
m.
Pacific time, I checked my watch a few minutes after.
The chyron at the bottom of the muted television changed.
The scroll said, “Shots fired at White House Correspondents Dinner, Washington Hilton, President evacuated.
” My mother saw it before I did.
She turned to look.
She made a sound, half a gasp, half a prayer.
I turned.
I saw the building.
I saw the chyron.
I felt the dream from Thursday night flood my body the way you feel cold water hit you when you have stepped into a pool you did not know was cold.
I knew.
I knew before I knew.
I cannot explain to you what I knew.
I knew that Cole was in that hotel.
I knew that the long, dark thing Cole had been holding in the dream was the Mossberg shotgun he had bought in August of 2025, and that the men in dark suits were Secret Service, and that the marble floor was the floor of the Washington Hilton lobby, and that the dream had not been a dream at all.
Dr.
Park had been right.
My mother stood up.
She walked to the television.
She unmuted it.
The CNN anchor was speaking very quickly.
She said, “We do not yet know if the president was the target.
We do not yet know if there are casualties.
We do not yet know who the suspect is.
” My mother sat down on the couch.
She put her hand on her chest.
She said, “Oh my god.
” I sat down beside her.
I said nothing.
I waited.
At approximately 6:08 p.
m.
Pacific, the news broke that a suspect had been arrested.
There was footage, phone footage, shaky, of a man being held face-down on the carpet.
The footage was small.
The man’s face was turned away.
At approximately 6:24 p.
m.
Pacific, the president’s Truth Social account posted a higher resolution photograph.
CNN cut to it full screen.
The man was face-down on the carpet.
His left cheek was visible.
His brown hair had fallen into his eyes the way the brown hair of every Caltech kid I had ever known fell into their eyes.
There was a single thin silver chain visible at the back of his neck where his shirt had ridden up.
I stood up from the couch.
I walked to the television.
I bent down.
[music] I looked.
It was Cole.
I went to the bathroom.
I closed the door.
I locked the door.
I knelt at the toilet.
I vomited.
I sat on the bathroom tile floor with my back against the bathtub.
I shook for 6 minutes.
My mother knocked.
I unlocked the door.
She came in.
She sat down beside me on the bathroom tile.
She held my hair off my face the way she had not held my hair off my face since I was 13 years old and I had a stomach flu in the seventh grade.
She said, “Sarah, that’s not him.
That’s not the Cole I know.
” I said, “Yes, mother.
It is.
” We sat on the bathroom tile for 40 minutes.
I did not cry.
I could not cry.
I would not be able to cry for another 4 hours.
My mother held my hair.
She rubbed my back.
She did not say anything else.
She knew enough not to say anything else.
At 8:30 p.
m.
Pacific, I told my mother I needed to go home.
She did not want me to go.
She tried to get me to stay overnight.
I said, “Mom, I have to go home.
I cannot explain why.
I just have to go home.
” She did not understand.
I did not understand.
I just knew I had to go home.
I now think, and I have been thinking about this for 96 hours, that I knew because the man at the door knew.
And the man at the door had already chosen the apartment on Locust Avenue and I was being pulled toward it.
I drove home alone.
I arrived at my apartment at 9:14 p.
m.
Pacific.
I unplugged the television.
I turned off all the lights except the one over the kitchen sink.
I walked to the kitchen.
I sat down on the floor with my back against the kitchen island.
I did not pray.
I did not know how to pray anymore.
I had not prayed in 9 years.
I waited.
One pause.
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Now, back to the story.
I do not know how long I sat on the kitchen floor.
I sat down at 9:15 p.
m.
What happened next happened at 10:30 p.
m.
So, I sat there for approximately 75 minutes.
But, the 75 minutes did not feel like 75 minutes.
They felt like 1 minute and they felt like 9 years.
My phone, which I had silenced before I left my mother’s house, was on the kitchen counter.
It vibrated 47 times in the first hour.
I counted eventually.
The FBI did not call yet.
Reporters did.
By 9:30 p.
m.
, three different newsrooms had connected my name to Cole’s name.
I did not answer any of them.
I sat on the kitchen floor and I watched my phone light up against the cabinet and I did not move.
At approximately 10:30 p.
m.
Pacific time on the night of Saturday, April 25th, 2026, I heard three slow knocks on my front door.
I want to be precise about the knocks.
The knocks were three.
Evenly spaced, about 2 seconds apart.
The kind of knock that is not the knock of a reporter who knocks fast and loud and four or five times in a row and not the knock of an FBI agent who would have announced himself and not the knock of a friend who would have rung the bell.
The knock was three slow knocks evenly spaced with no follow up no voice no announcement.
The kind of knock that asks permission.
I did not move.
I assumed it was a reporter.
The knock came again.
Three slow knocks evenly spaced.
And a voice on the other side of the door in a tone that I cannot describe in any language because it was not loud and it was not soft said one word.
Sarah.
I do not know how he knew my name.
The reporters knew my name.
I would learn the next morning that several outlets had already identified me as Cole’s ex-girlfriend by 9:00 p.
m.
Pacific.
But there was something in the way he said my name that was not a reporter.
He said my name the way my father had said my name.
My father had been dead for 6 years.
He had said it the way Patrick Brennan who used to come into my bedroom at 6:45 in the morning when I was 6 years old and put his hand on my forehead and say Sarah time for school had said it.
My father was the only person in my life who had ever said my name that way.
I had not heard anyone say my name that way in 6 years.
I stood up from the floor.
I walked to the door.
I did not look through the peephole.
I do not know why I did not look.
I just opened the door.
There was a man standing in the hallway outside my apartment.
He was perhaps 33 years old.
He was barefoot.
He had a beard.
The beard of a man in his early 30s who has not shaved in two or three weeks.
He had skin the color of a man from the Mediterranean.
Olive, sun-marked, a Levantine face.
His hair was dark and fell past his shoulders.
He wore a plain long garment, ankle-length, the color of unbleached linen.
His hands were down at his sides.
They were calloused at the base of the fingers.
They were the hands of a carpenter.
His eyes were the color of olive leaves in the morning.
I have not seen eyes like that before in any human being.
They were deep-set.
They were calm.
There was no fear in them, but there was no aggression, either.
There was only attention.
The kind of attention that a child wants from a parent.
The kind of attention that I had wanted from my father in the last weeks of his life when he had been too sick to give it.
He did not say anything.
He waited.
I said, “Are you a reporter?” He said, “No.
” I said, “Are you with the FBI?” He said, “No.
” I said, “Then who are you?” He said, “May I come in?” I do not know why I let him in.
I have asked myself this question 47 times in the past four days.
The closest answer I have is this.
When he asked, “May I come in?” I knew that I had been waiting for this question my entire adult life and that no one had ever asked it before.
Not Cole.
Not anyone.
They had all just come in the way men come in, the way human beings come in.
The man at the door asked, I let him in.
He walked into my kitchen.
He did not look around.
He did not seem to be inspecting the apartment.
He walked with his bare feet on the linoleum directly to the kitchen table.
He pulled out the chair on the side of the table that faces the front door, the chair where Cole used to sit every night for almost 2 years.
The chair where Cole had thrown my grandmother’s rosary into the fire on the night of September 18th, 2024.
The chair where Cole had read the Manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski on the night of January 1st, 2025.
The chair where I had told Cole that I could not become what he was becoming on the afternoon of January 14th, 2025.
The man sat in Cole’s chair.
He looked at me.
He said, “Sarah, you have been waiting since you were 19 years old to be told that you can come back.
You can come back.
” That is when I started to cry.
I had not cried since my mother had held my hair on her bathroom tile floor 4 hours earlier.
The tears had been held somewhere I could not reach.
When the man at the door said, “You can come back.
” the tears came.
They were not the tears of grief.
They were not the tears of fear.
They were the kind of tears you cry when something you have been carrying for 9 years that you did not know you were carrying suddenly becomes light enough to set down.
I sat in the chair across from him.
I cried for I do not know how long.
He waited.
He did not interrupt.
He did not say, “It is okay.
” He did not reach across the table to touch my hand.
He simply waited.
He let me cry.
When I was finished, he said, “I want to tell you something that you have to hear because no one else is going to tell you and you are going to need to hear it for the rest of your life.
Are you listening?” I nodded.
He said, “I tried to reach Cole also.
I tried for many years.
I tried when he was 16 years old and his father had just died.
I tried when he was 19 sitting in the Christian fellowship meeting at Caltech not really listening.
I tried when he was 26 kneeling on a linoleum floor at Roosevelt Elementary School explaining gear ratios to a 9-year-old boy.
And in that moment he was closer to me than he had been in 7 years.
I tried on the night of September 18th, 2024 when he threw your grandmother’s rosary into the fire.
I tried at 5:34 p.
m.
Pacific time on Saturday 2 minutes before he reached the security checkpoint when I asked him one last time to turn around.
He stopped listening.
The man you loved became a man who would not listen to me anymore.
That is not your fault.
You did not create him.
You did not enable him.
You loved him and your love was not enough.
And that is not because your love was small.
Your love was very very very large.
It is because the man you loved made a series of choices that went past where my voice could reach him.
You are not carrying his weight.
You loved him.
That is the only thing you ever did.
Come back.
He stopped.
He looked at me.
He waited.
I could not yet form a question.
He said one more thing.
“Tell them what I told you tonight.
Use your name.
Do not be afraid.
There is a book that is being written and your name is in the book.
Put your story in the book.
There are 99 other stories and the people who carry them are alone right now.
The way you have been alone for 9 years and they need to hear from you that they are not alone.
That is what the book is for.
>> [music] >> Tell them.
Then he stood up.
He walked across the kitchen.
He stopped at the threshold.
He turned and looked at me one more time.
He said, “Go to mass on Sunday.
St.
Lucy’s.
10:00.
Your mother is still going.
Sit beside her.
She has been waiting.
” He paused.
He smiled.
For the first time, briefly, he said, “And tell her, tonight, when you get home from work, after you record this, she has been waiting longer than you have.
” Then he walked out the door.
The door closed behind him at 11:14 p.
m.
Pacific time on the night of Saturday, April 25th, 2026.
I checked my watch.
I’m wearing the same watch right now.
I stood up from the table.
I walked to the door.
I opened it.
I stepped into the hallway.
The hallway was empty.
The door to the stairwell was closed.
The elevator was on the fourth floor and not moving.
I went back into my apartment.
I went to bed at 1:15 a.
m.
I slept for the first time since Wednesday.
I did not have the dream.
I have not had the dream since.
I woke up on Sunday morning, April 26th, 2026 at 7:00 a.
m.
Pacific.
I had not slept that long, that deeply, in almost 2 years.
I lay in bed for 10 minutes.
I had wondered, sleeping, if I had imagined it, if the man at the door had been a hallucination.
But I lay in bed on Sunday morning, and I knew, with a certainty I had not had about anything in 9 years, that it had not been a hallucination.
He had been real.
He had been there.
I got out of bed, I made coffee, I took a shower.
I drove to St.
Lucy’s Catholic Church in Long Beach.
I arrived in the parking lot at 9:42 a.
m.
The 10:00 a.
m.
mass was about to begin.
I sat in my car for 6 minutes.
I almost did not get out.
Then I thought about the man at the door, and I got out of the car.
I went into St.
Lucy’s.
I had not been inside the church since the spring of 2017.
The church looked the same as I remembered.
I sat in the back pew on the right side by the wall.
My mother was four rows ahead of me, where she always sits.
Where she has sat alone every Sunday for 9 years since I stopped coming.
She did not see me come in.
She had her back to me.
The mass began at 10:00 a.
m.
Father Michael Sheen, who had baptized me in 1998, began the mass with the sign of the cross.
I made the sign of the cross with him.
My right hand remembered how, even though I had not done it in 9 years.
The words came back to me.
I had not realized I still knew the words.
They had been waiting for me, the way the man at the door said my mother had been waiting for me.
I waited until the sign of peace, and then I stood up, and I walked four rows up, and I tapped my mother on the shoulder.
She turned around.
She looked at me.
She did not say anything.
She moved over.
She made room.
I sat down beside her.
I took her hand.
She squeezed my hand.
She did not let go.
She held my hand through the rest of the mass.
I received communion at 10:42 a.
m.
Pacific Time.
Father Sheen put the wafer on my tongue.
He said, “The body of Christ.
” I said, “Amen.
” It was the first time I had received communion since the spring of 2017.
I do not know how to describe what I felt.
I returned to the pew.
I knelt down.
I cried.
My mother put her hand on my back.
She did not say anything.
After mass, I walked out into the parking lot with my mother.
She did not ask me why I had come.
She did not ask me where I had been for 9 years.
She just walked beside me.
She said, “Sarah, do you want to come over for breakfast?” I said, “Mom, the FBI is going to come to my apartment this afternoon.
I have to go home.
” She said, “Oh.
” Then she said, “Sarah, I have been waiting for you.
” I said, “I know, Mom.
I am sorry it took me 9 years.
” She said, “Come back next Sunday.
” I said, “I will.
” I went home.
The FBI came at 2:30 p.
m.
They asked me questions for 2 hours and 11 minutes.
I made them coffee.
I told them everything I am telling you with one exception.
I did not tell them about the door.
The door was not theirs.
On Monday, April 27th, my principal Diane Vasquez called me at 7:15 a.
m.
She told me to take the week off.
I am still on leave.
On Monday afternoon, Cole had his first court appearance.
He was charged with attempted assassination of the President of the United States.
I watched the press conference.
There was a courtroom sketch shown on CNN at 1:15 p.
m.
I did not recognize the man in the sketch.
The hair was the same.
The hands in the sketch were the same.
The mouth was the man I had loved for 3 years.
The eyes were the man at the end.
The silver chain at his neck was drawn in by the courtroom artist as a small detail at the collar.
On Tuesday, April 28th, the Department of Justice held a second press conference.
They quoted a phrase he had written about himself, “Friendly federal assassin.
” That was not him.
That was not the Cole I knew.
The Cole I knew would have laughed at that phrase.
The man who wrote that phrase is the man who threw my grandmother’s rosary into the fire on September 18th, 2024.
And the man who left a note that said, “I am sorry.
I will not contact you again.
” on January 14th, 2025.
That is the man who wrote the phrase.
The Cole I met on October 22nd, 2021 did not.
Today is Wednesday, April 29th, 2026.
It is 10:00 in the morning Pacific time.
I am sitting at the same kitchen table where the man with bare feet sat four nights ago.
I am wearing my grandmother’s rosary, which I rebuilt yesterday from the wooden cross I saved out of the ashes on September 18th, 2024.
And a chain of glass beads I bought at a small religious shop in San Pedro yesterday afternoon.
I have not yet told my mother about the door.
I will tell her tonight.
I have not yet told Dr.
Park about the door.
I will tell her tomorrow.
I have not told the FBI about the door.
I am not going to.
I am telling you about the door now because the man at the door told me to tell.
I want to speak to anyone watching this who has loved someone who became someone you no longer recognize.
Whether your person became a violent man or a sick man or an addicted man or a man who walked away from you, the weight you have been carrying is not yours.
You loved the person you knew.
The person they became is not your construction.
He told me this.
He came to my door because he wanted me to know it.
So, I am telling you now.
It is not your weight.
Set it down.
I want to speak to my mother.
Mom, I know you are going to watch this.
The man at the door told me you have been waiting.
You have.
And I came back on Sunday.
I am coming back every Sunday.
I love you.
I am sorry it took me 9 years.
I am sorry I let you sit alone in that pew for 9 years while I slept in.
I am not going to do that anymore.
Saint Lucy’s, 10:00.
I will see you there on Sunday.
I want to speak to Cole.
Cole, I do not know if you will ever see this video.
But if it does reach you, I want you to know two things.
The first thing.
I think there is a chance, and I cannot tell you how high a chance, that the man who came to my door on Saturday night went to your cell next or will go to your cell at some point.
He has bare feet.
His hands are calloused.
His eyes are the color of olive leaves in the morning.
He is is He asks permission.
If he comes to you, Cole, just let him in.
The second thing, I forgave you on Sunday morning in the back pew at St.
Lucy’s before I walked up to my mother.
The Sarah you knew in October 2021 has forgiven the man you became in October 2024.
Both of those people existed.
I am going to spend the rest of my life remembering the first one.
I want to speak to the Secret Service officer who was shot in the chest on Saturday night and saved by his vest.
I do not know your name.
I have been praying for you every night this week.
Cole did not see you as a person.
I want you to know that there is at least one person in this country who has looked at the photograph of you on the floor of the Hilton lobby and seen a man, not a target.
Thank you for surviving.
And I want to speak to whoever is watching this video.
You did not click on this video by accident.
You are watching this for a reason that has nothing to do with the YouTube algorithm.
You are watching this because something has been waiting for you.
The way something was waiting for me at my front door at 10:30 p.
m.
on Saturday, April 25th, 2026.
I do not know what your version of the door is or what kind of voice you are going to hear when you open it, but I know what it is real because I have looked into the eyes of the man on the other side and I have sat across from him at my kitchen table and I have heard him say my name.
He has bare feet, his hands are calloused, his eyes are the color of olive leaves in the morning, and he is closer to your door tonight than you think.
My name is Sarah Brennan.
I am 28 years old.
I am a fourth grade English teacher at Roosevelt Elementary School in Long Beach, California.
I am the ex-girlfriend of Cole Thomas Allen who tried to assassinate the President of the United States on Saturday, April 25th, 2026 at 5:36 p.
m.
Pacific time in the lobby of the Washington Hilton Hotel.
I am Catholic by birth and Catholic again by Sunday morning, April 26th, 2026 at 10:42 a.
m.
Pacific time when I received communion for the first time in 9 years.
And on the night of Saturday, April 25th, 2026 at 10:30 p.
m.
Pacific time, the Lord Jesus Christ knocked three times on the door of my apartment in Long Beach, California and asked permission to come in.
I let him in.
That is my testimony.
Sarah Brennan’s testimony is now on this channel.
You just heard it.
Sarah is sending this story to the Real Encounters archive.
She goes into the next edition alongside the others who heard the same voice telling them to tell.
Edition one is already in print.
A hundred testimonies collected before Sarah, before that night.
A hundred people who opened a hundred doors and heard the same sentence.
If what you just heard from Sarah moved you, edition one has a hundred versions of it.
Reserve your copy now.
Link in the description.
Link in the pinned comment.
QR code full screen for the next 60 seconds.
If you read edition one and you do not cry at least once, write to us.
We refund your money.
You keep the book.
