FBI recovers rifle used in Charlie Kirk killing but shooter still at large
Police and US federal agents said on Thursday they had found the bolt-action rifle they believed was used to kill the influential conservative activist Charlie Kirk during a university appearance in Utah, but were still hunting the shooter.
Mr Kirk, 31, a podcast-radio commentator and an influential ally of Donald Trump, is credited with helping build the Republican president's base among younger voters. He was gunned down on Wednesday in what Utah Governor Spencer Cox called a political assassination.
The slaying, captured in graphic detail in video clips that rapidly spread around the internet, occurred during a midday event attended by 3,000 people at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, about 40 miles (65 km) south of Salt Lake City.
In one clip, blood could be seen gushing from Mr Kirk's neck immediately after a shot rang out, and he slumped in his chair.
The killer arrived on campus a few minutes before the event began, and could be seen on security-camera video ascending stairwells to get onto a nearby roof before firing a single shot, according to the FBI and state officials.
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.
The shooter appears to be of college age and "blended in well" on the campus, Utah Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason told reporters.
Mr Kirk, co-founder and president of the conservative student group Turning Point USA, was pronounced dead at a local hospital hours later. His murder stirred immediate expressions of outrage and denunciations of political violence from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Mr Cox said Mr Kirk’s events on college campuses were part of a tradition of open political debate that was “foundational to the formation of our country, to our most basic constitutional rights”.
“When someone takes the life of a person because of their ideas or their ideals, then that very constitutional foundation is threatened,” Mr Cox said.
Vice President JD Vance canceled his trip to New York to commemorate the attacks by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, and instead will travel to Utah to visit Kirk's family, a person familiar with the situation said.
Kirk began his career in conservative politics as a teenager. 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 lengthy tribute posted on social media. "He didn't just help us win in 2024, he helped us staff the entire government."
The shooting punctuated the most sustained period of US political violence since the 1970s. Reuters has documented more than 300 cases of politically motivated violent acts across the ideological spectrum since supporters of Mr Trump attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Mr 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.
Two people were detained, questioned and released on Wednesday evening, but neither were suspects, the FBI said on Thursday.
One of the two detainees, an older man seen in photos that circulated online shortly after the killing, was familiar to locals as a political "gadfly," according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Officials said he had been charged with obstruction by university police and released.
Mr Kirk, who was married and the father of two young children, had just returned to the United States from an overseas speaking tour in South Korea and Japan.
His appearance on Wednesday was the first in a planned 15-event "American Comeback Tour" of US college campuses.
Known for his often-provocative discourse on topics ranging from race and gender to immigration and firearms regulation, Mr Kirk often used such events to invite members of the crowd to debate him live.
At the moment he was shot, Mr Kirk, a staunch advocate of the Constitution's Second Amendment right to bear arms, was being questioned by an audience member about gun violence, according to multiple videos of the event posted online.
In a video message taped in the Oval Office and posted to Mr Trump's Truth Social online platform, the president vowed that his administration would track down those responsible for Mr Kirk's killing.
Mr Trump, who routinely describes political rivals, judges and others who stand in his way as "radical left lunatics" and warns that they pose an existential threat to the nation, also decried violent political rhetoric, while casting it as a phenomenon of the political 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," Mr Trump said the video, recorded in the Oval Office. "This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now."
