The Utah trade school student jailed on suspicion of fatally shooting United States conservative activist Charlie Kirk faces formal charges next week, according to the governor, following an act of violence widely seen as a foreboding inflexion point in American politics.
Tyler Robinson, 22, was arrested on Thursday night after relatives and a family friend alerted authorities that he had implicated himself in the crime, Governor Spencer Cox said on Friday, opening a press conference with the words, “We got him.”
The arrest capped a 33-hour manhunt for the lone suspect in Wednesday’s killing, which US President Donald Trump has called a “heinous assassination”.
Kirk, co-founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA and a staunch Trump ally, was gunned down by a single rifle shot fired from a rooftop during an outdoor event attended by 3,000 people at Utah Valley University in Orem, about 65 kilometres south of Salt Lake City.
The sniper made his getaway in the ensuing pandemonium, captured in graphic detail in video clips that circulated widely on the internet and television news reports.
@dawn.today US conservative activist Charlie Kirk, an influential ally of President Donald Trump, was fatally shot on Wednesday while speaking at Utah University, sparking a manhunt for a lone sniper who the governor said had carried out a political assassination. Authorities said they still had no suspect in custody as of Wednesday night, some eight hours after the midday shooting at Utah Valley University campus in Orem, Utah, during an event attended by 3,000 people. The lone perpetrator suspected of firing the single gunshot that killed Kirk, 31, apparently from a distant rooftop sniper’s nest on campus, remained “at large,” said Beau Mason, commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety, at a news conference four hours later. #DawnToday ♬ original sound – Dawn.com
A bolt-action rifle believed to be the murder weapon was found nearby, and police released images from surveillance cameras showing a “person of interest” wearing dark clothing and sunglasses.
A break in the case came when a relative and a family friend alerted the local sheriff’s office that he had “confessed to them or implied that he had committed” the murder, Cox said.
“I want to thank the family members of Tyler Robinson, who did the right thing in this case and were able to bring him into law enforcement,” the governor said.
Security camera footage and evidence gathered from the suspect’s profile on the chat and streaming platform Discord also helped investigators link him to the crime, Cox added.
@dawn.today A young Utah man suspected of killing influential United States conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a university in the city of Orem was in custody on Friday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox told reporters. “We got him,” Cox told reporters. The suspect, identified as Tyler Robinson, had confessed to a family friend or “implied that he had committed the murder” to that friend and that person in turn had contacted the Washington County sheriff’s office on Thursday. A family member interviewed by investigators said Robinson had become more political recently and spoke in a disparaging manner about Kirk, Cox told reporters. Robinson was taken into custody on Thursday night, about 33 hours after Kirk’s murder, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel said at the press conference. #DawnToday ♬ original sound – Dawn.com
‘Watershed in American history’
The killing has stirred outrage among Kirk’s supporters and condemnation of political violence from across the ideological spectrum.
“It is an attack on all of us,” Governor Cox said, calling Kirk’s murder a “watershed in American history” and comparing it to the rash of US political assassinations of the 1960s.
Cox declined to discuss possible motives for the killing. But in describing inscriptions investigators found on ammunition recovered from the scene, he said one of the casings bore the message: ‘Here fascist! Catch!’
“I think that speaks for itself,” he said in response to reporters’ questions.
State records show Robinson was a registered voter but not affiliated with any political party. But a relative told investigators that Robinson had grown more political in recent years and had once discussed with another family member their dislike for Kirk and his viewpoints, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
Many Republicans, including Trump, have been quick to lash out at the political left, accusing liberals of fomenting anti-conservative vitriol that would encourage a kindred spirit to cross the line into violence.
Democrats, decrying political violence more generally while calling for stronger gun laws, have countered that Trump himself routinely uses inflammatory rhetoric to demonise his political foes, judges and the mainstream media.
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the symbology found on the bullet casings suggests the shooter was part of the so-called Groyper movement, associated with far-right activist and commentator Nick Fuentes.
Right, left or crazy?
“It’s an eclectic ideological movement marked by video game memes, anti-gay, Nick Fuentes white supremacy, irony,” she said. “It certainly leans right, but it is quite eclectic.
“In a way, the ideological beliefs of the shooter don’t matter,” she said. “What matters is how they’re taken by society. And if our society chooses to keep pointing fingers, whether the person turns out to be right, left or just unstable, then the violence will grow from the pointing of fingers, regardless of the act itself.”
Kleinfeld said most perpetrators of political violence were not clearly on one ideological side or another, but typically driven by “a hodgepodge of conspiracy beliefs and mental illness”.
“So it wouldn’t be surprising at all if this person was a person of the far right, if this person was a person who held a variety of different beliefs and was sort of unclassifiable,” she added.
Kirk’s murder comes amid the most sustained period of US political violence in decades. Reuters has documented more than 300 cases of politically motivated violent acts across the ideological spectrum since Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump himself has survived two attempts on his life, one that left him with a grazed ear during a campaign event in July 2024 and another two months later, foiled by federal agents.
Democrats have fallen victim, too. In April, an arsonist broke into Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence and set it on fire while the family was inside.
Earlier this year, a gunman posing as a police officer in Minnesota murdered Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and shot Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife.
In her first public comments since her spouse was slain, Erika Kirk vowed in a tearful but defiant video message on Friday evening that “the movement built by my husband will not die” but grow stronger.
Speaking from the studio of his radio-podcast show, she urged young people to join Turning Point, exalting her husband as a fallen political hero who “now and for all eternity will stand at his saviour’s side wearing the glorious crown of a martyr.”
Who is Tyler Robinson?
Eighteen-year-old Tyler Robinson seemingly had a bright future ahead of him.
The Utah teen had scored in the top percentile on his college entrance exam and earned himself a four-year scholarship to Utah State University in Logan. His proud mother posted a video on Facebook in which her firstborn son, the oldest of three, read aloud the school’s letter offering him the grant.
“He’s so excited to start his journey and it’s going to be so amazing for him!” she wrote in another post.
Robinson, now 22, was arrested for aggravated murder and other charges over the shooting. He has no criminal history, according to state records reviewed by Reuters.
Investigators are still working to understand what allegedly led Robinson to that rooftop. Officials have not yet identified a precise motive for the shooting, though they offered some clues on Friday morning in announcing his arrest.
He was a registered voter but was not affiliated with a political party, according to voter records. He is listed as an “inactive” voter, which indicates he did not cast a ballot in last year’s presidential election, when Republican Donald Trump defeated Democrat Kamala Harris.
At the time of the shooting, Robinson was living at his parents’ house in Washington, a farming and residential community of approximately 28,000 near Zion National Park in southwestern Utah.
Robinson’s grey Dodge Challenger — the vehicle that authorities say he drove to the site of the shooting on Tuesday — was parked on Friday outside the two-story stucco home, in a relatively new housing development built among alfalfa fields.
Dozens of media members were gathered outside, along with half a dozen police cars parked along the street. Officers were stopping reporters from approaching the home.
A neighbour, Steven Green, said he knew the family from attending the same Mormon church down the street.
“Great family, good kids,” he said, though he added he did not know Tyler Robinson well.
Canaan Timothy, 21, said he was in the year below Robinson at high school. Robinson, he said, was just a regular student with an interest in music, who hung out with members of the school band.
“I knew him in passing. Just your average kid,” said Timothy, who lives two blocks from the Robinson family. “Tyler, he was quiet, but not too quiet.”
Robinson was arrested late on Thursday without incident after a family friend called authorities and said Robinson had either confessed or implied that he was responsible for Kirk’s murder, officials said.
Attended university briefly
Robinson graduated in 2021 from Pine View High School in St. George, Utah. A video online of the commencement ceremony shows him carrying his diploma on stage as attendees cheer. He briefly attended Utah State University in Logan for one semester that fall, the school confirmed to Reuters.
It was not immediately clear why he left, but Dixie Technical College, part of Utah’s public university system, confirmed that he is a third-year student in the school’s electrical apprenticeship program.
A Facebook post from his mother said Robinson had earned a score of 34 in high school on the ACT college entrance exam, which would put him in the top 1 per cent of test takers, according to the Princeton Review test preparation company.
He has two younger brothers, according to his parents’ Facebook posts. His mother listed her job online as a social worker at a non-profit healthcare company, while his father is the principal of a company that makes stone countertops, according to state records.
His mother’s Facebook posts over the years — most of which were deleted on Friday — mostly doted on her family: documenting trips to Alaska, the Caribbean and Disneyland; celebrating school plays, Halloween costumes and adopted pet rabbits; expressing pride as the three boys moved up in school.
None of the posts appeared overtly political.
Other posts show Robinson and his brothers occasionally with guns, though that is not uncommon in a state with permissive firearms laws.
