A young Utah man suspected of killing the influential conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a university in the city of Orem was in custody on Friday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox told reporters.
"We got him," Cox told reporters. The suspect, identified as Tyler Robinson, had confessed to a family friend – or "implied that he had committed the murder" to that friend – and that person in turn had contacted the Washington County sheriff's office on Thursday.
A family member interviewed by investigators said Robinson had become more political recently and spoke in a disparaging manner about Kirk, Cox told reporters. Robinson was taken into custody on Thursday night, about 33 hours after Kirk's murder, FBI Director Kash Patel said at the press conference.
Kirk, a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, was killed by a single bullet as he spoke onstage at an outdoor amphitheatre at Utah Valley University on Wednesday.
Previously, U.S. investigators said they had found the bolt-action rifle believed to have been used to kill Kirk and released images of a person of interest.
Footage shows the assassin jumping from the roof where he killed Kirk
(Video: FBI)
Investigators spoke to Robinson's roommate, who showed them comments Robinson had made on Discord, a chat and streaming platform popular with gamers, discussing retrieving a rifle from a drop point and then leaving the rifle in a bush wrapped in a towel. This matched the description of the gun that authorities recovered after the shooting in a wooded area near campus.
Ammunition found at the scene had been inscribed, Cox said. The messages on the casing included: "What's this;" "Oh, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Ciao;" "If you read this, you are gay, LMAO;" and "Hey fascist, catch!," Cox told reporters.
Kirk, a well-connected activist, author, and podcast host, helped build support for Trump and the Republican Party among younger voters.
Kirk was the co-founder and president of the conservative student group Turning Point USA and appeared at Utah Valley on Wednesday as 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.
The killing of Kirk ignited a wave of fury on the far right, where some Trump supporters cast the murder as a political flashpoint and threat to conservative power amid a broader reckoning over rising violence.
Some supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump blamed the political left, casting Kirk’s murder as the culmination of years of hostility toward Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. On social media, they pointed to posts that appeared to celebrate Kirk’s death as evidence of conservatives increasingly being targeted.
“ They couldn’t beat him in a debate, so they assassinated him,” Isabella Maria DeLuca, a pardoned January 6 rioter and conservative activist, wrote on X.
Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and prominent Trump supporter, said in an interview Kirk’s ability to galvanize a new generation of conservatives posed “an existential threat to the future of leftist ideology and power.”