PinnedUpdated Sept. 10, 2025, 6:27 p.m. ETCharlie Kirk, the charismatic founder of the nation’s pre-eminent right-wing youth activist group, was fatally shot on Wednesday while speaking at Utah Valley University. His killing prompted outrage from politicians of both parties, who called for an end to politically motivated violence, and grief from prominent media figures.The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, posted on social media about four hours after the shooting that a suspect had been taken into custody.President Trump mourned Mr. Kirk, 31, a close ally, 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 was struck about 20 minutes after he began speaking on the university’s campus in Orem, Utah. The university said shortly after the shooting that a person had been taken into custody, but officials later determined that the person who was detained by police officers was not the gunman.Here are the details:Images of the shooting: Cellphone videos posted online showed people running from the event, and 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 ›Sept. 10, 2025, 6:30 p.m. ETBeau Mason, commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety, said he there is still an active investigation for the person of interest, who is still at large. That directly contradicts a social media post from the F.B.I. Director Kash Patel, who said a suspect “is now in custody.”Sept. 10, 2025, 6:29 p.m. ETBeau Mason confirms that the police did take someone into custody who turned out to not be the shooter. Still, he said, that person was booked and accused of obstruction of justice.Sept. 10, 2025, 6:28 p.m. ETCharlie Kirk was taken in a private vehicle to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, says Beau Mason, the commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety at the start of a news conference about the shooting.Sept. 10, 2025, 6:25 p.m. ETF.B.I. Director Kash Patel said the “subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.”Sept. 10, 2025, 6:16 p.m. ETThat Trump is a survivor of two assassination attempts in 2024 — one a near-miss in Butler, Pa. — is never far from the minds of his team. The killing of Kirk, who was as staunch a supporter of Trump as there was after the president left the White House in 2021, was chilling to them.Sept. 10, 2025, 6:13 p.m. ETSeveral of President Trump’s top advisers were close with or admired Charlie Kirk. Late Wednesday afternoon, the mood at the White House in the wake of the shooting was one of shock and sorrow. Trump met with top officials in the Oval Office. Elsewhere in the building, aides and staff members, some of them who appeared to have been crying, tended to their work while, in the background, news reports blared on television that the shooter had not yet been caught.Sept. 10, 2025, 6:06 p.m. ETCoverage of the Utah shooting was closely watched at the Capitol in Washington on Wednesday.Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York TimesConservative 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.”Megyn Kelly, streaming live on YouTube, was tearful even before the news was confirmed, sobbing with her guest, Glenn Beck of The Blaze.She described Mr. Kirk as a friend who supported her even when her relations with the MAGA world were strained. “I am so sorry to be bringing you this news,” Ms. Kelly told her audience. Later in the stream, she warmly praised former Presidents Obama and Biden for extending their sympathies to Mr. Kirk’s family. “I accept those hands of friendship,” she said of the Democratic leaders.Mr. Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University while on the “American Comeback Tour,” an event series produced by Turning Point USA, the right-wing political organization he founded. Ms. Kelly was scheduled to appear alongside Mr. Kirk on a similar tour stop in Virginia on Sept. 24.Mr. Kirk, a frequent guest on Fox News, also served as a guest host of “Fox & Friends Weekend” over the summer.On “The Five,” Dana Perino, the Fox host and former White House press secretary, struggled to speak at times as she discussed Mr. Kirk’s death. Jesse Watters, her co-host, sounded angry, telling viewers, “We’re going to avenge Charlie’s death.” Jeanine Pirro, a former host on the show who is now the U.S. attorney for Washington, called in to “The Five” to say that she was “heartbroken.”Right-wing influencers and podcast hosts poured their grief onto the social media platform X. Benny Johnson, the YouTuber, called Mr. Kirk “a martyr.” Ben Shapiro, the co-founder of the Daily Wire, wrote that Mr. Kirk was 18 when they met.“‘That kid is going to be the head of the R.N.C. one day,’” Mr. Shapiro said he told a friend at the time. “Charlie became even bigger and more important than that.”Sept. 10, 2025, 5:55 p.m. ETZachary 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.Sept. 10, 2025, 5:51 p.m. ETStephen 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.”Sept. 10, 2025, 5:40 p.m. ETUtah 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.Sept. 10, 2025, 5:25 p.m. ETCharlotte DulanyFormer 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.Sept. 10, 2025, 5:19 p.m. ETCharlie 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.When and where did the shooting take place?According to the university, Mr. Kirk was shot at about 12:10 p.m. local time, about 20 minutes after he began speaking on campus, about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City.Aerial image by GoogleBy Lazaro Gamio and Daniel WoodThe event was the first of a 15-stop itinerary on what was called the American Comeback Tour, which had planned appearances at college campuses across the country.Where was Mr. Kirk?Credit...Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/REUTERS, via Via ReutersMr. Kirk was sitting beneath a white tent emblazoned with “American Comeback,” in an outdoor amphitheater space on campus.Seconds before he was shot, he was asked a question about mass shootings in America.Credit...Tess Crowley/The Deseret News, via Associated PressWhere was the shooter?A spokeswoman for the university said the shooter fired at Mr. Kirk from the Losee Center, a building about 200 yards away.The gunman is not yet in custody. The school originally said that the shooter had been taken into custody, but police determined that the person they had detained was not the gunman.What happened after?Credit...Tess Crowley/The Deseret News, via Associated PressVideos showed people fleeing from the event. Immediately after news of the shooting broke, statements expressing shock and horror began to pour in on social media from prominent figures on both the right and the left.Search activity is ongoing at the university and officials said that four agencies were actively investigating the shooting.Sept. 10, 2025, 5:09 p.m. ETPresident Trump has ordered all American flags to be lowered to half-staff until Sunday evening at 6 p.m. in honor of Kirk.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesSept. 10, 2025, 4:56 p.m. ETUtah 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.Sept. 10, 2025, 4:55 p.m. ETBenjamin WoodReporting from the Utah Valley University campusSearch 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.Sept. 10, 2025, 4:45 p.m. ETPresident 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!”Sept. 10, 2025, 4:44 p.m. ETRobert DraperAndrew Kolvet, Kirk’s spokesman, says Kirk is dead.Credit...Nic Antaya for The New York TimesSept. 10, 2025, 4:42 p.m. ETSpeaker 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.Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York TimesSept. 10, 2025, 4:36 p.m. ETPolice 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.Credit...Kim Raff for The New York TimesSept. 10, 2025, 4:31 p.m. ETAllison Hemingway-Witty reacts after the shooting at Utah Valley University on Wednesday.Credit...Tess Crowley/The Deseret News, via Associated PressThe 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!”Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director and a former right-wing podcast host, wrote on X that the F.B.I. was “closely monitoring” the situation.“Our thoughts are with Charlie, his loved ones, and everyone affected,” he wrote. “Agents will be on the scene quickly and the FBI stands in full support of the ongoing response and investigation.”Others immediately focused on what larger political issues were to blame for the shooting. Elon Musk declared on X that “The Left is the party of murder.”Harrison Smith, an InfoWars host, blamed the “fostering of extremism, the encouraging of the most radical and violent elements of the Democratic Party, constantly telling this swath of mentally ill people that they’re under attack, that fascism is coming, that they have to stand up and fight and arm yourselves — and this is almost the inevitable outcome.”Though a motive for the attack was not immediately known, several politicians denounced political violence, including some previous victims.Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who was a victim of a politically motivated arson attack at the governor’s mansion earlier this year, condemned the attack in a statement. “We must speak with moral clarity,” he said. “The attack on Charlie Kirk is horrifying and this growing type of unconscionable violence cannot be allowed in our society.”Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman and a Democrat who nearly died in a 2011 assassination attempt, said on social media that she was “horrified” to hear that Mr. 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.Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, wrote: “Political violence is NEVER acceptable. My thoughts and prayers are with Charlie Kirk and his family.”Mike Baker, Devlin Barrett, Kate Conger, Maggie Haberman and Bernard Mokam contributed reporting.Sept. 10, 2025, 4:29 p.m. ETHouse 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.”Sept. 10, 2025, 4:19 p.m. ETA witness described a chaotic scene at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Wednesday when the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot.Credit...Tess Crowley/The Deseret News, via Associated PressAndrew 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.”He had been in line at a campus event at Utah Valley University, waiting to speak to and debate Mr. Kirk, as students typically do in “Prove Me Wrong” debates that Mr. Kirk, a right-wing activist, would host.Mr. Piskadlo, who estimated that he was about 80 feet away, recalled that Mr. Kirk had been responding to a question about transgender mass shooting suspects before he was shot.When the shot rang out, Mr. Piskadlo said that he dropped first but did not run. He said he did not see Mr. Kirk get shot. He estimated that the shooting occurred shortly after the program began, shortly after noon local time.Brandon Russon, a 24-year-old student at Ensign College in Salt Lake City, said he was near the front row of the crowd, about 20 feet from Mr. Kirk.“I just saw Charlie kind of slump backwards, and I saw — it was very graphic — I saw a lot of blood. And then everybody around me just fell to the ground trying to take cover,” Mr. Russon said. He described a split second of confusion: Mr. Kirk was being asked about mass shootings at the time, and for a brief moment, Mr. Russon wondered whether the shooting was part of an act.“That lasted only about a second before I realized it was something very serious going on,” he said. Fearing that more shots could be fired, Mr. Russon said he stayed crouched on the ground for about a minute as people screamed and ran around him.He said that he texted his wife to tell her what was happening and that he loved her, then grabbed his friend, who was next to him, and ran for a nearby building.Mr. Russon said he was still shaken up by the event and felt grateful to be alive.He recalled that before it started, he had turned to his friend and said the courtyard venue was not ideal for someone who was a “divisive public figure.”Mr. Piskadlo said that the setup of the amphitheater struck him as unsafe before the event. Despite a heavy security presence, he noticed “there were a lot of ledges, points where this could happen,” he said. “This seemed really preventable. I’m kind of angry at the organizers.”Isaac Davis, a junior at Utah Valley University, said the shot fired “wasn’t that loud.” He added, “It was definitely noticeable, but it sounded almost like a firecracker.” He said he believed the shooter was not in the crowd.Mr. Davis said the scene devolved into “hysteria” after the shot, and he and several others were pushed indoors and into a classroom to hide. “I just didn’t want to be in the building while everything was going on so I ran out of it,” he said.Benjamin Wood contributed reporting from the campus of Utah Valley University.Sept. 10, 2025, 4:10 p.m. ETKamala 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.”Sept. 10, 2025, 4:02 p.m. ETCharlie Kirk, right, speaking with Lara Trump during the Turning Point Action conference at Huntington Place in Detroit last year.Credit...Nic Antaya for The New York TimesTurning 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.”Turning Point USA also hosts a number of popular podcasts, including “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which has a focus on right-wing politics, and “Culture Apothecary,” which is led by Alex Clark and focuses on conservative views about wellness, lifestyle and the Make America Healthy Again movement.This month, Mr. Kirk, now 31, kicked off the American Comeback Tour, in which he was set to visit campuses across the country — including Colorado State, the University of Minnesota and Montana State — to talk about conservative politics.In June, Turning Point USA organized the largest gathering of young conservative women in the country, where speakers, including Mr. Kirk and his wife, Erika, urged the 3,000 young women to put marriage before careers.This December, the group is set to hold AmericaFest, which draws high-profile right-wing speakers like Greg Gutfeld, Glenn Beck and Jack Posobiec.Sept. 10, 2025, 4:02 p.m. ETThe 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.Sept. 10, 2025, 4:01 p.m. ETRex SakamotoVideo 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.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:50 p.m. ETKirk’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.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:20 p.m. ETFrom the magazineCharlie Kirk at his podcast studio.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times(The New York Times Magazine published a profile of Charlie Kirk in 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.”Kirk found himself wondering how everyone would have reacted had he taken the much-closer seat he was originally offered. Instead, because the event had been moved inside, he and his wife were seated a couple of dozen rows from the stage. Kirk lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., but brought his wife and two young children with him to stay at the sleek Salamander hotel in Washington for 10 days in January as the Trump administration took power, just as he had uprooted his family three days after the election and installed them for a two-month stay in a condo in Palm Beach, Fla., near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.Like so many others in the MAGA ecosystem, Kirk is acutely attuned to wherever the Trump-related action is. The difference is that Kirk always seems to find his way to the center of the action whenever he shows up to it. During Trump’s first presidency, Kirk told me, he visited the White House “a hundred-plus” times. And within days of Trump’s victory in November, Kirk had become one of an intimate group of advisers vetting prospective White House appointees to determine whether they had shown unflagging loyalty to Trump. On more than one occasion, according to two sources with knowledge of the events, Kirk was in the room with the president-elect to discuss potential cabinet nominees.Kirk’s proximity to Trump is especially notable when you consider that he has never held office, worked in the White House or held a campaign staff position. He draws his value elsewhere. Kirk is the head of Turning Point USA, the nation’s pre-eminent conservative youth organization, which he started when he was 18. It has chapters at more than 850 colleges that register students to vote, bring conservative speakers to campus and organize a nationwide network of right-wing student-government leaders. Turning Point’s half-dozen or so annual events, featuring the biggest names on the right from Trump on down, are slick productions that draw enormous crowds.But perhaps most important is that Kirk’s dominant voice, via his podcast and his ubiquity on social media, has earned him credibility among conservatives as a die-hard Trump devotee. He has become a close friend of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with whom Kirk traveled to Greenland on Jan. 7 — wearing a “Charlie”-embroidered flight jacket for the occasion — to publicize Trump’s proclaimed intent to acquire the Arctic territory. And Kirk was an early champion of JD Vance as Trump was deciding whether the senator would be his running mate.Kirk was among a select group at Trump’s private party two days before the inauguration at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. The night before Trump was sworn in, Turning Point hosted a black-tie gala at which some 1,500 attendees paid from $5,000 to $15,000 (with some V.I.P.s paying more) to be in the company of Trump luminaries including Vance; Trump’s nominee for director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel; and Don Jr., who described Kirk onstage as “one of the true rock stars of this movement.” The following evening, an S.U.V. ferried Kirk from one inaugural ball to the next. Two days later, he was visiting the 47th president in the White House — and again the day after that.During the Trump years, Kirk’s two nonprofit entities, Turning Point USA and the political-action organization Turning Point Action, have grown from a total revenue of $4.3 million in 2016 to $92.4 million in 2023, a vast majority of it from donations. Through his podcast, his many speaking appearances and the books he has written, such as the 2020 best seller “The MAGA Doctrine,” Kirk has become a millionaire.Trump, in turn, has come to view Kirk as one of his closest allies. Kirk visited Mar-a-Lago in early February 2021, during the ex-president’s nadir, and was photographed smiling alongside him. Four years later, at the president-elect’s golf-club party, Trump singled out Kirk for praise. “Charlie Kirk, what he’s done with the young people,” he said in a video I obtained. He went on to boast about his campaign’s sharp uptick among such voters. “Actually, other than Hispanic, that was probably our biggest swing. So, Charlie, I appreciate what you did.”