Fuzzy video footage of Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer racing across a rooftop at Utah Valley University, dropping to the ground and sprinting away in the moments following the conservative activist’s death on Wednesday, was taken from so far away that it could not possibly have revealed his identity.
“You started off with a clip that made him look like an ant,” Donald Trump told Fox News in a Friday morning interview as the US president discussed the killing of the right-wing activist at a campus speaking engagement attended by thousands of students.
But the value to FBI investigators of the public release of the video at about 8pm local time on Thursday night, along with a series of high-definition images of the suspect, was beyond measure. It set into motion a rapid series of events that ended just three hours later with the arrest of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.
A relative confronted him, elicited a confession, then alerted a family friend who turned him in, the Utah governor, Spencer Cox, revealed at a press conference on Friday.
RM Block
Experts say the imagery “supercharged” the progression of an investigation that had appeared to stumble at a senior level in the first 24 hours after Kirk’s shooting, with the FBI director, Kash Patel, twice announcing, then retracting, that the person believed to be responsible had been caught.
According to Patel, calls to investigators with information were plentiful, and had reached 11,000 in number by Friday morning. “Every one of those leads will be run out,” he promised.
Most of the details, however, came from Cox, a Republican.
Cox was reluctant to draw a direct line from the release of the video and photographs to Robinson’s arrest, but acknowledged the events occurred within short order, and that “through some process the family came to know that this had happened”.
It was reported by some media outlets later on Friday that the suspect’s father, Matt Robinson, a 27-year veteran with Utah’s Washington county sheriff’s department, about 200 miles from the murder scene, told his pastor about his son’s confession, and it was the pastor who called it in.
“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,” Cox said.
The governor said investigators worked furiously to process chunks of information about the suspect that were coming in rapidly, and from interviews with family members and “a roommate of Robinson” they built a picture of a young man so consumed by hate at Kirk’s upcoming campus visit that he constructed and enacted a plan to kill him.
[ FBI releases photos of ‘person of interest’ in inquiry into Charlie Kirk shootingOpens in new window ]
Evidence, he said, included photographs of messages Robinson shared with the roommate that mentioned “stating a need to retrieve a rifle from a drop point, leaving the rifle in a bush … wrapped in a towel”.
Crime scene investigators later retrieved a Mauser model 98, in .30-06 caliber, a type of bolt-action firearm, with a scope mounted on top of it, that Cox said was found wrapped in a dark-coloured towel.
He said three unfired casings featured engravings reading: “Hey fascist! Catch!”, “Oh bella ciao” and “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO [laughing my ass off]”. The fired casing had the inscription “notices bulge OWO what’s this?”, a form of language used as an in-joke in some online communities.
Video footage from the university’s surveillance cameras had also assisted in identifying Robinson, a former student, through his gray Dodge Challenger, which was recorded driving on to the campus at 8.29am on the morning of the shooting, Cox said.
The suspect also changed clothes twice, the governor asserted. He said Robinson was spotted arriving in a maroon-colored shirt, switched into darker clothes to commit the murder, then reverted to his original outfit, which he was still wearing at the time of his arrest late on Thursday.
