By Andrew Hay and Brad Brooks
SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) -Police and federal agents mounted an intense manhunt on Thursday for the sniper believed to have fired the single gunshot that killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk as he was fielding questions about gun violence during a university appearance.
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 Kirk’s neck immediately after a shot rang out, and he slumped in his chair.
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.
Cox said 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,” Cox said.
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, one that left him with a grazed ear during a campaign event in July 2024 and another two months later foiled by federal agents.
The lone perpetrator suspected of firing the single gunshot that struck Kirk in the neck, apparently from a 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.
Security camera footage showed a person believed to be the assailant dressed in all-dark clothing, Mason told reporters. But some eight hours after the killing, authorities said they still had no suspect in custody.
State police issued a statement on Wednesday night saying that two men had been detained, and one was interrogated by law enforcement, but both were released.
“There are no current ties to the shooting with either of these individuals,” the statement said. “There is an ongoing investigation and manhunt for the shooter.”
NO SUSPECTS IN CUSTODY, MULTIPLE ‘CRIME SCENES’
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.
The other man had been initially described by the governor as a “person of interest” in the investigation.
Police said late on Wednesday that investigators were seeking clues at “multiple active crime scenes,” pinpointed on the basis of where Kirk was shot and “locations where the suspect the victim traveled.”
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 U.S. college campuses.
Known for his often-provocative discourse on topics ranging from race and gender to immigration and firearms regulation, Kirk often used such events to invite members of the crowd to debate him live.
At the moment he was shot, 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 Trump’s Truth Social online platform, the president vowed that his administration would track down those responsible for Kirk’s killing.
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,” 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.”
(Reporting by Andrew Hay in Orem, Utah, and Brad Brooks in Logan, Colorado; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Jana Winter, Helen Coster, Jasper Ward, James Oliphant, Bo Erickson, Andrea Shalal, Kanishka Singh, Jonathan Allen, Ismail Shakil and Julia Harte; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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