OREM: The Utah trade school student jailed on suspicion of fatally shooting United States conservative activist Charlie Kirk faces formal charges next week, according to the state governor.
The act of violence is widely seen as a foreboding inflexion point in American politics.
Tyler Robinson, 22, was arrested on Thursday night after relatives and a family friend alerted authorities that he had implicated himself in the crime, Governor Spencer Cox said on Friday, opening a press conference with the words, “We got him.”
The arrest capped a 33-hour manhunt for the lone suspect in Wednesday’s killing, which U.S. President Donald Trump has called a “heinous assassination.”
Kirk gunned down
Kirk, co-founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA and a staunch Trump ally, was gunned down by a single rifle shot fired from a rooftop during an outdoor event attended by 3,000 people at Utah Valley University in Orem, about 65 kilometers south of Salt Lake City.
The sniper made his getaway in the ensuing pandemonium, captured in graphic detail in video clips that circulated widely on the internet and television news reports.
A bolt-action rifle believed to be the murder weapon was found nearby, and police released images from surveillance cameras showing a “person of interest” wearing dark clothing and sunglasses.
A break in the case came when a relative and a family friend alerted the local sheriff’s office that he had “confessed to them or implied that he had committed” the murder, Cox said.
“I want to thank the family members of Tyler Robinson, who did the right thing in this case and were able to bring him into law enforcement,” the governor said.
Security camera footage and evidence gathered from the suspect’s profile on the chat and streaming platform Discord also helped investigators link him to the crime, Cox added.
‘Watershed in American history’
The killing has stirred outrage among Kirk’s supporters and condemnation of political violence from across the ideological spectrum.
“It is an attack on all of us,” Governor Cox said, calling Kirk’s murder a “watershed in American history” and comparing it to the rash of US political assassinations of the 1960s.
Cox declined to discuss possible motives for the killing. But in describing inscriptions investigators found on ammunition recovered from the scene, he said one of the casings bore the message: “Here fascist! Catch!”
“I think that speaks for itself,” he said in response to reporters’ questions.
Right, left or crazy?
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the symbology found on the bullet casings suggests the shooter was part of the so-called Groyper movement, associated with far-right activist and commentator Nick Fuentes.
“It’s an eclectic ideological movement marked by video game memes, anti-gay, Nick Fuentes white supremacy and irony,” she said.
“It certainly leans right, but it is quite eclectic. In a way, the ideological beliefs of the shooter don’t matter,” she said.
“What matters is how they’re taken by society. And if our society chooses to keep pointing fingers, whether the person turns out to be right, left or just unstable, then the violence will grow from the pointing of fingers, regardless of the act itself.”
Kleinfeld said most perpetrators of political violence were not clearly on one ideological side or another but typically driven by “a hodgepodge of conspiracy beliefs and mental illness.”
“So, it wouldn’t be surprising at all if this person were a person of the far right, if this person was a person who held a variety of different beliefs and was sort of unclassifiable,” she added.
