Live Updates: Charlie Kirk, Charismatic Right-Wing Activist, Fatally Shot in Utah
"Mr. Kirk, 31, a close ally of President Trump, was killed while speaking in front of a large crowd at Utah Valley University. A university official said no suspect was in custody.
Charlie Kirk, a close ally of President Trump and the charismatic founder of the nation’s pre-eminent right-wing youth activist organization, was fatally shot on Wednesday while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University, his spokesman Andrew Kolvet said.
Law enforcement officials are still looking for the shooter, said a university spokeswoman, Ellen Treanor, who added: “There is no suspect in custody; it is an active investigation.” The campus was closed, and classes have been canceled.
President Trump mourned Mr. Kirk in a post on social media. “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,” he wrote, adding, “He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us.”
Ms. Treanor said that Mr. Kirk, 31, was struck about 20 minutes after he began speaking on the university’s campus in Orem, Utah. She said an attacker had fired at Mr. Kirk from the Losee Center, a building more than 100 yards away.
The university originally said the shooter had been taken into custody. But officials later determined that the person who was detained by police officers and seen in videos circulating online was not the gunman, said another spokesman, Scott Trotter.
Here are the details:
Images of the shooting: Cellphone videos posted online showed people running from the event. One showed Mr. Kirk’s head jerking back as blood poured from his neck. He had been delivering remarks while sitting under a tent with the slogan “The American Comeback.” Witnesses described chaos after the shooting. Read more ›
Rooftop video: Videos recorded before and after the shooting show a person on the roof of the Losee Center, about 150 yards from where Mr. Kirk was shot. In one, an onlooker says they saw someone run across the roof and lie down, pointing out the visible outline of the person. In a second video, the person can be seen rushing away from that spot immediately after the shooting.
Bipartisan condemnation: Democrats and Republicans quickly denounced the shooting on social media and in Congress. In a post, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California, called the violence “disgusting, vile and reprehensible.” Mr. Trump ordered American flags to be lowered to half-staff until Sunday evening in Mr. Kirk’s honor. Read more ›
Trump ally: Mr. Kirk had emerged in recent years as one of the most influential young right-wing figures in the country. He co-founded the youth activist group Turning Point USA in 2012, and had become a fixture on college campuses, where he hosted rallies like the one in Utah that often draw large crowds. Though Mr. Kirk was not part of the administration, he held significant influence in the White House. Read more ›
Conservative media is in mourning.
On Fox News, the anchor Will Cain choked up on-air as he read aloud President Trump’s announcement of the death of Charlie Kirk. “I don’t know where we go from here as a news program,” Mr. Cain told viewers, “and I don’t know where we go from here in America.”
Zachary Morris, who attended the event with his 3-year-old daughter, described confusion and a “mass panic” in the crowd when the shot was fired. “All I could think was that I gotta get my daughter out of there,” he said.
Stephen Miller, one of the key architects of President Trump’s domestic agenda, expressed his grief about the death of Charlie Kirk on social media. “Our hearts are shattered,” Miller wrote on X. “All of us must now dedicate ourselves to defeating the evil that stole Charlie from this world.”
Utah Valley University officials encouraged students who are still on campus, or who had taken shelter in university buildings after the shooting, to call for a police escort. “Police will come and escort you out of the building,” the university wrote on social media.
Former presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama both decried political violence in posts on social media.
“We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy,” Obama wrote on X.
Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old conservative activist and media personality, was killed by a gunshot in the neck while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday.
The event was being held at an outdoor stage, where at least 1,000 people had gathered to hear Mr. Kirk speak.
President Trump has ordered all American flags to be lowered to half-staff until Sunday evening at 6 p.m. in honor of Kirk.
Utah Valley University officials confirmed that no one had been arrested. “There is no suspect in custody, it is an active investigation,” Ellen Treanor, a university spokesperson, said in a statement. The university said four agencies are investigating the shooting: Orem Police, Utah Valley University Police, the F.B.I. and the Utah Department of Public Safety.
Reporting from the Utah Valley University campus
Search activity is continuing at Utah Valley University, where several groups of armed and outfitted agents can been seen making sweeps through central campus, on foot and on trucks.
President Trump announced on social media that Charlie Kirk had died after being shot in the neck at an event in Utah.
“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”
Andrew Kolvet, Kirk’s spokesman, says Kirk is dead.
Speaker Mike Johnson paused the House in the middle of a series of votes to call for a moment of silence and prayer for Charlie Kirk. When Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado asked for someone to lead a prayer aloud, several Democrats objected, pointing out that the House had not given a school shooting in Colorado earlier in the day the same treatment. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who is close to Kirk, then began shouting angrily at the other side of aisle.
Police officers are going building to building and escorting people off campus, Utah Valley University said on social media. Roads to the campus are closed, the university said.
The shooting of Charlie Kirk on Wednesday at Utah Valley University prompted an outpouring of reaction from across the political spectrum, with some calling for prayers and others immediately casting blame.
President Trump, who considers Mr. Kirk a close ally, wrote on his Truth Social platform, “We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot. A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!”
House Speaker Mike Johnson called the shooting “detestable.”
“Political violence has become all too common in American society, and this is not who we are,” Johnson said, adding: “We need every political figure, we need everyone who has a platform to say this loudly and clearly. We can settle disagreements and disputes in a civil manner, and political violence must be called out, and it has to stop.”
Andrew Piskadlo was standing in the middle of a campus amphitheater on Wednesday, waiting to debate Charlie Kirk about the Eighth Amendment, when a single shot rang out.
“It was surprising, and no one really got down until the people in front of the stage did,” Mr. Piskadlo, 28, of Salt Lake City, said in a phone interview. “People got down in waves.”
Kamala Harris, the former vice president, said on social media she was “deeply disturbed” by the shooting of Kirk, adding, “I condemn this act, and we all must work together to ensure this does not lead to more violence.”
Turning Point USA, founded by Charlie Kirk when he was 18, is a sprawling right-wing political organization with more than 850 campus chapters. The group sends conservative speakers to college campuses and hosts conferences that convene thousands of young people for right-wing discussions of political issues like economics, race and immigration.
Turning Point claimed a significant role in getting young people to vote for President Trump, who made inroads particularly with Gen Z men in the 2024 election. Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. referred to Mr. Kirk as “one of the true rock stars of this movement.”
The police have determined that a person who was taken into custody after the shooting was not actually the shooter, according to Scott Trotter, a university spokesman. The university had earlier said a suspect was in custody.
Video posted on social media shows the moment Charlie Kirk was shot and the seconds leading to the incident. Kirk was being asked questions about mass shootings in America.
“Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years?” a person asks. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk responds right before he is shot.
Kirk’s event at Utah Valley University was the first appearance of a 15-stop itinerary on what was called the American Comeback Tour. In recent years, Kirk, 31, has made college campus stops a centerpiece of his messaging, encouraging students and the general public to ask him questions directly in debate-style format confrontations. Videos of those question-and-answer sessions have become popular on YouTube, with some amassing millions of views.
Utah Valley University said on social media that it has closed its campus and canceled classes until further notice. The university urged those on campus to “secure in place until police officers can escort you safely off campus.”
Charlie Kirk was scheduled to debate a progressive influencer, Hasan Piker, at Dartmouth College on Sept. 25. On his Twitch live stream, Piker reacted to the news with horror, urging some of his followers to stop making jokes about the shooting, and he expressed fear that he could be similarly targeted.
In a social media post, Vice President JD Vance called on Americans to “say a prayer for Charlie Kirk, a genuinely good guy and a young father.” Vance regularly texts with Kirk.
In a second post, Vance included a photograph that showed him with Kirk and Donald Trump Jr.
Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who nearly died in a 2011 assassination attempt, said she was “horrified” to hear that Kirk had been shot. “Democratic societies will always have political disagreements, but we must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence,” she said on social media.
FROM THE MAGAZINE
(The New York Times Magazine published a profile of Charlie Kirkin February 2025.)
About an hour before Donald J. Trump took the oath of office, Charlie Kirk was sitting in the Capitol Rotunda when he glanced down at his iPhone. What the 31-year-old conservative activist and media personality saw caused him to swallow laughter. A reporter for The Daily Beast had posted on X: “‘Charlie Kirk has better seats than every member of Congress. Tells you how little Trump thinks of Congress,’ one GOP lawmaker tells me.” Twenty minutes later, Kirk saw that a Republican senator from Indiana, Jim Banks, had posted a rebuttal of sorts: “Charlie Kirk has done more than most members of congress combined to get us to this point today.”
A spokeswoman for Utah Valley University, Ellen Treanor, said that Kirk was struck by a suspect who had fired from the Losee Center, a building about 200 yards away.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California called on Americans to reject political violence, describing the attack on Charlie Kirk as “disgusting, vile and reprehensible.” No officials have yet assigned a motive to the attack.
At least three videos posted on social media on Wednesday show the right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk being struck by apparent gunfire while giving a speech at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. In all of the videos, a pop can be heard before Kirk, who was seated on a chair under a small tent, recoils from being struck. In two graphic videos filmed from nearby, blood is seen coming from Kirk’s neck as he falls to his left.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called the apparent shooting of Charlie Kirk a “sick and despicable attack” in a post on social media. Graham and several other Republican senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas and Katie Britt of Alabama, said that they are praying for Kirk.
President Trump just posted on social media in support of Charlie Kirk, a close ally and high-profile supporter of the president.
“We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot,” he wrote on Truth Social. “A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!”
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche posted on social media that he is praying for “my friend Charlie Kirk,” adding that the Justice Department “is actively investigating this senseless act of violence.”
Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah said on social media that he is being briefed by law enforcement “following the violence directed at Charlie Kirk during his visit to Utah today.”
“Those responsible will be held fully accountable,” Cox said.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has dispatched agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to the scene of the shooting.
A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. office in Utah said the office is aware of the reported shooting and agents are responding to the scene.
F.B.I. Director Kash Patel said on social media that the bureau is “closely monitoring reports of the tragic shooting involving Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. Our thoughts are with Charlie, his loved ones, and everyone affected. Agents will be on the scene quickly and the FBI stands in full support of the ongoing response and investigation.”
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