The Last Person to Speak With Charlie Kirk Before the Shooting Shares Their Account

On September 10, 2025, Hunter Kozak left the hospital where his newborn daughter, Hope, had arrived just days earlier and made his way to campus for a public debate with Charlie Kirk.

Kozak, a liberal who was studying at Utah Valley University to become a math teacher, was sharply opposed to Kirk’s politics. Still, he respected the Turning Point USA co-founder’s open-invitation approach to debating anyone willing to step up.

At 12.20pm, with roughly 3,000 people watching, Kozak’s name was called. Wearing a gray hoodie and blue jeans, he walked to within a few feet of Kirk.

‘Hey Charlie, hopefully we’re gonna have a little more disagreement,’ Kozak quipped as he began.

He had weighed asking Kirk about the Epstein files, but instead chose to focus on mass shootings and gun rights — a subject closely tied to Kirk’s outspoken defense of the Second Amendment.

The exchange appeared set to become a substantive clash of ideas. Kozak noted that a recent attack carried out by a transgender shooter had sparked calls in MAGA circles to strip transgender Americans of gun rights, a suggestion that drew cheers from parts of the crowd.

‘Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last ten years?’ Kozak asked.

Kirk answered with one of his trademark rapid-fire replies: ‘Too many.’

Noting the lack of empirical evidence, Kozak hit back: ‘In America, it’s five. Now, five is a lot. I’m gonna give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been over the last ten years?’

Kirk responded: ‘Counting or not counting gang violence?’

‘Great…,’ said Kozak.

But before he could go on, a shot rang out, hitting Kirk in the neck and fatally wounding him.

The bullet must have passed close to Kozak, probably just over his head. His body shaking, he threw his hands up over his ears and hit the floor.

Looking back one year on, Kozak’s own memory plays tricks on him. It tells him he was ‘calm and collected’ and that he ‘just sort of ducked down and got out of there.’

‘But I rewatched the video, and I’m in a panic, and I’m horrified,’ he told Our News Outlet on the anniversary. ‘It’s almost like an out-of-body experience sometimes when I rewatch those videos.’

Tyler Robinson, 23, who was charged in connection with Kirk’s killing, has pleaded not guilty to all counts, including aggravated murder.

The risk to others around Kirk is considered an aggravating factor under state law that makes Robinson eligible for the death penalty.

 Kozak was probably the next person the bullet passed closest to.

‘There wasn’t really time to process that in the moment, but of course later, when I’m reliving it,’ he said. ‘It’s not lost on me.

‘I mean, I was speaking to him. I saw him get hit, which we all saw.’

Something he could never have foreseen was that people would try to make him part of some elaborate conspiracy, and it began ‘immediately.’

Conspiracy theorists jumped on the coincidence that he had been asking about guns at the moment Kirk was shot.

They called him a ‘patsy,’ a ‘murderer,’ and a ‘crisis actor.’ They claimed he had signaled the shooter by touching his glasses, and that he had practiced his reaction to the shooting beforehand, all of which was false and ludicrous.

‘They have a ton of terms,’ said Kozak. ‘I definitely wonder why people who saw me at that event felt like they should throw me to a mob. I saw comments online creeping up immediately.

‘Obviously, the very first piece of information is what he [Kirk] was saying, and I was the obvious person to immediately go to.

‘He was talking about guns, he’s talking about shootings, and then they get shot. I think when it comes to conspiracy theorists, they often say that they don’t believe in coincidences.’

People started making YouTube videos about him, getting hundreds of thousands of views.

One of them ‘numerous times made fun of the way that I responded, and they said this is clearly an act,’ said Kozak. ‘It really upset me. It really horrified me.

‘They hide under plausible deniability. It’s always, “I’m just asking questions, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on, but also isn’t all of this suspicious?” And then spend three hours talking about how suspicious I am. I try to ignore it as best as I can.’

‘It’s not just being called a crisis actor. It’s like these people genuinely think that I’m capable of murder.’

At one point, a man started circling around his apartment building, rambling conspiracy theories, and there was a flood of ‘really aggressive direct messages’ including death threats.

One YouTuber offered $20,000 to stream an interview of him taking a lie detector test. He looked up the false positive rates for lie detector tests and declined.

The experience has made Kozak interested in why conspiracy theorists do what they do.

He decided to make his own hour-long video, in which he talks to conspiracy theorists themselves.

On one occasion, he phoned a YouTuber who had been publishing content about him.

‘It was jarring how pleasant, how kind he was in comparison to the videos,’ he said. ‘It really gave him pause to speak to me. It was about a four-month campaign of him making these videos, and then I talked to him, and we took an eight-month sabbatical. And two weeks ago, he started making videos again.’

He also contacted someone who had called him a ‘crisis actor’ online.

‘She was just horrified that I reached back,’ he said. ‘It was like I was a punching bag that she was using, and it grew a face in front of her and said, “Why are you punching me?” And she’s like, “I don’t even know, I was just letting out my anger.”‘

As to what is behind all the conspiracy theories, he blames a variety of factors, including ‘sad people’ who ‘feel venerated if they’re able to spread information.’

‘I do think that a monetary incentive is part of the conversation, but it’s not all of it,’ he said. ‘I do think that they also are motivated by what they think is happening, and they do genuinely think that, in the case of one guy who thinks that I’m behind it, that Charlie Kirk is actually still alive and on an island somewhere.’

Kozak feels deep sympathy for Erika Kirk, who has also been targeted by conspiracy theorists.

‘She’s the head of the largest conservative organization in America, but that also needs to live side by side with the fact that she’s a widow and she has been harassed probably orders of magnitude more than I have,’ he said. ‘And I deeply sympathize with it. I’m critical of her politics, but that is a woman who did lose a husband.’

The murder case against Robinson is headed for trial, and the defendant could face the death penalty if he’s convicted.

Earlier this month, Utah District Judge Tony Graf sided with prosecutors who said they had ‘a mountain of evidence’ that Robinson fatally shot the conservative activist. 

Robinson pleaded not guilty to all counts, including aggravated murder, following Graf’s decision.

The defense team tried to block a trial or at least take the death penalty off the table, arguing that prosecutors failed to show Kirk’s shooting placed others around him at risk of death.

Kirk’s family called the ruling ‘an important step in our family’s pursuit of justice.’