He was asking Charlie Kirk a question, then a shot rang out

Hunter had just finished asking Charlie Kirk a question about how many mass shootings have happened in the United States over the past decade when he heard a loud pop.

The 29-year-old philosophy and mathematics student at Utah Valley University didn’t spend a lot of time around guns, so he didn’t immediately recognise the sound. But he instinctively grasped his head and stepped backward from the microphone as the crowd screamed.

When he saw Kirk bleeding, Hunter knew what had just happened.

“My brain immediately went: drop to the floor. Then I thought: that is an assassination. He was the target. It was right on point. Charlie is dead,” said Hunter, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition that he be identified by only his first name because he fears he and his family could face threats.

Hitting the ground, Hunter looked at the surrounding students who had queued for over an hour for the chance to debate Kirk. Organisers had moved Hunter to the front of the line when they realised he was a left-wing student with differing opinions, he said.

The students reassured each other before crouching and scurrying away from the “Prove Me Wrong” tent as Kirk’s security team hustled the stricken 31-year-old away.

After the shooting, Hunter’s first thought was to find his wife, the mother of his two children, who was in the audience and recording a video at the time of the shot.

The pair of political junkies had taken a break from visiting their days-old daughter in a neonatal intensive care unit to attend the event at UVU, where Hunter is studying for his bachelor’s degree.

Immediately after he was reunited with his wife on Wednesday, Hunter sought out a police officer and provided his contact details and the video his wife took of the shooting, he said.

His brother, he said, had also been in a school shooting and lives nearby. The pair had talked about their shocking shared experiences.

Initially, Hunter’s instinct was to be cautious of the limelight, avoiding calls and texts from people who recognised him from videos of the event, he said. He worried that once people realised that he was a liberal activist, he and his family would become a target for conspiracy theorists.

Although he decided to attend the UVU event on his own initiative, Hunter had for months been involved with an organised liberal effort to counter Kirk’s incredibly effective and popular right-wing group.

Hunter, who posts on TikTok as @staxioms, is a creator-in-training with the Unf--k America Tour, a group created by the National Ground Game PAC that brings Democratic content creators to Turning Point events to debate, make viral videos and encourage voter registration.

Earlier this summer, Hunter attended Kirk’s Student Action Summit in Tampa, where he posted TikTok videos interviewing Trump supporters - and disguised himself as one to attend by wearing one of Kirk’s signature “47” hats.

The group says on its website it is challenging Turning Point and Kirk specifically “because they’re targeting our communities, our campuses, and our future”.

Hunter’s family urged him to stay quiet. But on Thursday, concerned that online speculation that he had been involved in a conspiracy to hurt Kirk was growing out of control, he decided to make a public statement to address his history of criticising Kirk and condemn the violence.

“I don’t know how to make this video. It’s been a rough 24 hours,” he said in the video he posted to TikTok and X, speaking directly to the camera.

He explained that he had previously criticised Kirk online for characterising transgender people as violent, and that he had gone to the rally to ask him about that. He had expected and welcomed a confrontation, but never dreamed of brutality.

In the video he identifies himself as “the last person to talk to Charlie Kirk” and plays clips from old content he created countering Kirk’s narrative about transgender school shootings.

He says he “can barely” rewatch footage of the moment Kirk was shot, but that “people have obviously pointed to the irony that I was - the point that I was trying to make is how peaceful the left was. Right before he got shot.”

“Charlie had two kids and a wife, and not to make this about me, but I have two kids and a wife,” he said in the video. “It’s a tragedy and it’s hard to grapple with.”

Now he is bracing for a wave of online speculation and potential abuse. “A lot of people have been throwing my face around saying ‘look into this guy,’” because he has been such a vocal critic of Kirk, he said. Some right-wing accounts in the initial moments after the shooting suggested he had shot Kirk.

He said he has not spent a second celebrating Kirk’s death.

“Charlie clearly believed in strong debate and argumentation with people who disagreed with him,” he said.

“I wanted to meet him because I think a lot of people don’t engage in conversation - especially with people that I see or interact with. Their version of changing people’s minds is just protesting or shouting platitudes and sometimes violence. And I think I went there because I don’t see that as the path forward. I’m devastated, and my heart goes so much out to his family. I found out he had kids right after the fact,” he said.

In the day since the shooting, the Unf--k America Tour has been trying to contact Turning Point in hopes of organizing a joint event next week, the group’s founder, Zee Cohen-Sanchez, said in an interview Thursday.

Although they were political opponents, her organisation was in many ways modelled after Kirk’s, she said. He had an “ability to marry the online creator space with the ground game,” that “no one” else on the left or right has been able to match.

Now she fears for her own team.

Many of the creators in Cohen-Sanchez’s network have been berated online since Kirk’s death, and some have received death threats, she said.

Despite their political disagreements, she added, she and Kirk agreed on one thing: “We need to have open discussions and open debate”.

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