Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and close ally of President Donald Trump who played an influential role in rallying young Republican voters, was shot and killed at a Utah college event in what the governor called a political assassination. The shooter has not been found.
Authorities say Kirk was killed with a single shot from a rooftop on Wednesday. Whoever fired the gun then slipped away amid the chaos of screams and students fleeing the Utah Valley University campus.
The circumstances of the
shooting drew renewed attention to an escalating threat of political violence in the United States that, in the last several years, has cut across the ideological spectrum. The assassination drew bipartisan condemnation, but a national reckoning over ways to prevent political grievances from manifesting as deadly violence seemed elusive.
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The 31-year-old activist personified the pugnacious, populist conservatism that has taken over the Republican Party in the age of Trump.
An unabashed Christian conservative who often made provocative statements about gender, race and politics, Kirk launched his organization, Turning Point USA, in 2012, targeting younger people and venturing onto liberal-leaning college campuses where many GOP activists were nervous to tread.
Federal, state and local authorities are still searching for an unidentified shooter and working what they called “multiple active crime scenes.” Two people were detained Wednesday but neither was determined to be connected to the shooting and both were released, Utah public safety officials said. Authorities did not immediately identify a motive.
The Utah Department of Public Safety says its commissioner, as well as the FBI special agent in charge, will speak to reporters at 9 a.m. ET on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem. The news conference will be streamed on the department’s Instagram page.
In a video message from the Oval Office late Wednesday, Trump called Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom” and condemned the “demonizing” of political opponents in the U.S., even as he claimed the rhetoric of the “radical left” was “directly responsible” for the assassination of Kirk. The assassination drew bipartisan condemnation.
The assassination has drawn bipartisan condemnation, but a national reckoning over ways to prevent political grievances from manifesting as deadly violence seemed elusive.
Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, are set to visit with Kirk’s family on Thursday in Salt Lake City.
According to a person familiar with Vance’s plans, but not authorized to speak about them publicly, the Vances will visit Utah instead of New York, which had been their planned destination for an outdoor ceremony to commemorate Sept. 11.
