OREM, Utah (Reuters) – U.S. investigators said on Thursday they had found the bolt-action rifle they believed was used to kill the influential conservative activist Charlie Kirk and released images of a person of interest as they searched for the shooter they described as college age.
Kirk, a 31-year-old author, podcast host and close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, helped build the Republican Party’s support among younger voters. He was killed on Wednesday by a single gunshot as he gave a talk at a university in Utah in what Trump called a “heinous assassination.”
FBI and state officials said the killer arrived on the campus a few minutes before the event began, a debate led by Kirk titled “Prove Me Wrong” outdoors in front of about 3,000 people at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, about 40 miles (65 km) south of Salt Lake City.
Security-camera videos show a person going up stairwells to get onto a roof before firing at Kirk, the officials told a press conference. Kirk, a staunch defender of gun rights, was answering an audience question about mass shootings when the bullet struck his neck. Audience members fled in panic.
The shooter jumped off the roof and fled into an adjoining neighborhood, Robert Bohls, the FBI special agent in charge, told reporters.
Investigators found a “high-powered, bolt-action” rifle in a nearby wooded area, and were examining that along with palm prints and footprints for clues. On Thursday, with classes canceled, the roof of the building on the otherwise deserted campus and the nearby woods were strung with yellow tape as investigators scoured them for evidence.
The shooter appears to be of college age and “blended in well” on the campus, Utah Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason told reporters.
The shooter has not been publicly identified, though lawmakers, commentators and online sleuths have already filled social media and messageboards with speculation and blame-casting about the killer’s ideology.
FBI Director Kash Patel was traveling to Orem and due to brief reporters later on Thursday, NBC News reported.
The FBI offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest and circulated grainy images apparently taken from security cameras showing a “person of interest” wearing a black top, black sunglasses and a dark baseball cap. The top appears to have an image of a bald eagle flying across a U.S. flag.
TRUMP TO AWARD KIRK TOP HONOR
Ammunition found so far appeared to have been engraved with messages, the Wall Street Journal reported, but people familiar with the investigation told Reuters the engravings and their meaning were still being analyzed.
Kirk was co-founder and president of the conservative student group Turning Point USA and his appearance on Wednesday was part of a planned 15-event “American Comeback Tour” of U.S. college campuses. His killing stirred outrage and denunciations of political violence from Democrats, Republicans and foreign governments.
Trump said he would award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Vice President JD Vance canceled his trip to New York to commemorate the attacks by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, and instead traveled to Utah to see Kirk’s family and to fly them and Kirk’s casket home to Arizona aboard Air Force Two.
Kirk began his career in conservative and right-wing politics as a teenager, which he has described as shaped by his Christian faith. A little more than a decade later, some of the friends he made along the way are now at the highest levels of U.S. government and media, with Vance recalling that he was in multiple group chats with Kirk.
“So much of the success we’ve had in this administration traces directly to Charlie’s ability to organize and convene,” Vance wrote in a tribute posted on social media. “He didn’t just help us win in 2024, he helped us staff the entire government.”
Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, said in a statement that its co-founder had believed in “the power of argument and good-faith debate” and had received thousands of threats.
ERA OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
The shooting punctuated the most sustained period of U.S. political violence since the 1970s. Reuters has documented more than 300 cases of politically motivated violent acts across the ideological spectrum since supporters of Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump himself has survived two attempts on his life last year, one that left him with a grazed ear during a campaign event and another two months later foiled by federal agents. Two people were detained, questioned and released on Wednesday evening, but neither was a suspect, the FBI said on Thursday.
Kirk, who was married and the father of two young children, published his most recent book last year calling for a “Right Wing Revolution” and had just returned from a speaking tour in South Korea and Japan.
He was championed by Republicans as a charismatic advocate for right-wing policies on race, gender, immigration, religion and gun regulation who frequently engaged with his critics from the far left to the far right, often inviting members of his audiences to debate him live.
“He would go into these hostile crowds and answer their questions,” Vance wrote in his tribute. “If it was a friendly crowd, and a progressive asked a question to jeers from the audience, he’d encourage his fans to calm down and let everyone speak.”
In a video message taped in the Oval Office, Trump vowed to track down those responsible for Kirk’s killing, along with “each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
Trump, who routinely describes political rivals, judges and others who stand in his way as “radical left lunatics” who pose an existential threat to the nation, also decried violent political rhetoric, while casting it as a phenomenon of the left.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said in the video. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
(Reporting by Andrew Hay in Orem, and Brad Brooks in Colorado; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Jana Winter, Helen Coster, Jasper Ward, James Oliphant, Bo Erickson, Andrea Shalal, Kanishka Singh, Ismail Shakil, Julia Harte, Sarah N. Lynch and Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Paul Thomasch, Ross Colvin, Nick Zieminski and Alistair Bell)
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