Stories of witnesses who were in attendance for conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination continue to emerge. For some, the experience will remain unforgettable.
“I talked about this the other day, in an experience like that, you have two decisions, fight or flight,” a father named Elliott Thorn shared on Saturday.
Kirk, co-founder of Turning Point USA, was speaking at Utah Valley University when he was struck by a single rifle round fired from a rooftop approximately 200 yards away. Thorn, who was with his wife and baby, says he was just eight feet from Kirk when the shot was fired. He immediately covered his baby with his body for protection.
“For me, the biggest thing that I cared mostly about was my family,” he said.
“As any dad or husband or father or anything would hopefully do, the biggest thing for me was ensuring my family was not going to get hit or taken to a place where they were going to be unsafe,” he added.
Thorn said Kirk’s murder could be a moment for everyone in the country to learn from.
“We are developing a shame-based society where people are being taught not to feel their feelings and talk about their feelings, and express them, and do all these things,” he said. “And so people are suffering in silence, and we’re having massive blow-ups everywhere.”
Kirk’s suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, was arrested after a 33-hour manhunt. According to authorities, Robinson confessed to a family friend or “implied that he had committed the murder” and that individual subsequently contacted the Washington County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday.
sources said Robinson was on the FBI’s radar on Thursday and was initially identified through facial-recognition investigative methods.
Robinson is expected to be formally charged next week, according to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who called Kirk’s murder a political assassination.
