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OREM: A young Utah man suspected of killing the conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a university forum was taken into custody on Thursday night.
“We got him,” Utah Governor Spencer Cox told reporters at a briefing, expressing a sense of relief after an intense manhunt by local and federal law enforcement that followed Kirk’s murder on Wednesday by a sniper at Utah Valley University in Orem.
The suspect, identified as Tyler Robinson, 22, was taken into custody about 33 hours after the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel told reporters.
The agency had received more than 11,000 tips as of Friday morning, the most since the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, he added.
Robinson was captured after he confessed to a family friend, or “implied that he had committed” the murder to that friend, the governor said. That person in turn contacted the Washington county sheriff’s office.
Law enforcement officials had previously released a series of security camera images of a person of interest and asked the public to help identify him.
Kirk, a close ally of President Donald Trump, was killed by a single bullet as he spoke onstage at an outdoor amphitheatre at Utah Valley. Trump called the shooting a “heinous assassination”.
The killing has stirred outrage among Kirk’s supporters and denunciations of political violence from Democrats, Republicans and foreign governments. The charismatic 31-year-old helped build support for Trump among young voters in the presidential election.
“It is an attack on all of us,” Utah’s governor said, drawing parallels between Kirk’s murder and the assassinations of President John Kennedy, his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s.
“It is an attack on the American experiment,” Cox said. “It is an attack on our ideals.”
The shooting has punctuated the most sustained period of US political violence since the 1970s.
There have been more than 300 cases of politically motivated violent acts across the ideological spectrum since supporters of Trump attacked the US Capitol on Jan 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 last year and another two months later, foiled by federal agents.
Tracking down suspect
Details about Robinson’s life are just beginning to emerge. At the time of the shooting he was living with his parents at his family’s home in Washington county, in the southwest corner of Utah near the Nevada border.
The suspect did not appear to have any criminal history, according to state records. He was a registered voter but was not affiliated with a political party, according to state voter records.
A family member interviewed by investigators said Robinson had become more political in recent years and had said to another relative that he disliked Charlie Kirk and his viewpoints, Ytah Governor Cox said.
He was arrested for aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm causing serious injury and obstruction of justice, according to an affidavit filed by investigators.
He has not been formally charged in court and is being held at a jail in Utah.
Investigators previously said they had found the bolt-action rifle believed to have been used to kill Kirk.
Investigators also spoke to Robinson’s roommate, according to the affidavit.
Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2025
