Charlie Kirk’s family accuses university of ‘stunning’ security failures
In a legal notice filed this month, lawyers for Kirk’s wife, parents, and children said Utah Valley University did not monitor access to rooftops during Kirk's outdoor event.
The family of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk has accused the Utah university where he was killed last year of “stunning” security failures that made him an easy target for a rooftop assassin.
In a legal notice filed this month, lawyers for Kirk’s wife, parents, and children said Utah Valley University did not have a written security plan or hold a security briefing before Kirk arrived for an open-air debate last September that drew a crowd of thousands.
They also said the university’s police chief had failed to address concerns raised by Turning Point USA, the conservative activist group founded by Kirk, about how easily people could climb onto the rooftops that overlook the sunken plaza where he was shot.
The accusations came in a “notice of claim” that lawyers for the Kirk family sent to the state of Utah earlier this month and made public Wednesday. Kirk’s family has not yet sued, but the notice is a potential precursor to a wrongful-death lawsuit against the public university or the state.
“His murder was entirely preventable,” Brett Parkinson, a lawyer for the Kirk family, said in a statement.
In a statement Tuesday, Utah Valley University said its “focus remains on supporting our campus community” but declined to comment further on the notice. It is conducting its own review of security surrounding the shooting.
Kirk, one of the country’s most influential and visible conservative activists, made Utah Valley University in Orem the first stop of his “American Comeback” tour of college campuses. About 3,000 people showed up on Sept. 10, 2025, to see him debate political opponents on a sunny afternoon.
He was just minutes into the event and answering an audience member’s question when he was shot in the neck by a gunman perched on a rooftop about 400 feet away.
In the legal notice, lawyers for Kirk’s family said the university’s security decisions “ultimately rendered Mr. Kirk helpless to the rooftop shooter in an assassination that could have been avoided.”
According to the notice, a Turning Point USA official texted Jeff Long, the university police chief, before the event to relay concerns from a Turning Point campus chapter about students’ ability to take staircases to building rooftops.
“It would be nice to either have it controlled access or allow one of my guys to be there as well. If possible,” a Turning Point official texted Long, according to the legal notice.
Kirk’s lawyers say Long responded, “I got you covered.”
Lawyers for the Kirk family argued in the legal notice that the university should have been on alert for a rooftop sniper after a would-be assassin fired at President Donald Trump in 2024 from a roof outside a rally in Butler, Pa.
Surveillance videos and testimony from investigators suggest that Tyler J. Robinson, the 23-year-old man charged with aggravated murder in Kirk’s killing, encountered virtually no obstacles or resistance on his way to the roof. Robinson, who could face the death penalty, has pleaded not guilty.
Surveillance videos from the morning of the shooting captured the gunman as he walked to a railing on the roof of a campus building and then left. When he returned later, he “crawled to a sniper perch” along the edge of the roof, took aim at Kirk, and fired, according to a legal filing by prosecutors.
The legal claim filed by Kirk’s family said the university did not fly drones or monitor its surveillance cameras in real time during the event — actions that might have spotted the gunman.
It also says that despite Kirk’s fame and the size of the crowd, the university only had six officers on duty that day and did not ask police in Orem or nearby Provo for help until after the fatal shot was fired.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
