• Tyler Robinson had enrolled in electrical apprenticeship.
• Governor credits suspect’s family with bringing him to justice.
• Republicans, Democrats point fingers across partisan divide. 

The Utah trade school student jailed on suspicion of fatally shooting conservative activist Charlie Kirk faces formal charges next week, according to the governor, following an act of violence widely seen as a foreboding inflection point in US politics.

Tyler Robinson, 22, was arrested on Thursday night after relatives and a family friend alerted authorities that he had implicated himself in the crime, Governor Spencer Cox said on Friday, opening a press conference with the words, “We got him.”

The arrest capped a 33-hour manhunt for the lone suspect in Wednesday’s killing, which President Donald Trump has called a “heinous assassination.”

Kirk, co-founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA and a staunch Trump ally, was gunned down by a single rifle shot fired from a rooftop during an outdoor event attended by 3,000 people at Utah Valley University in Orem, about 40 miles south (65km) of Salt Lake City.

The sniper made his getaway in the ensuing pandemonium, captured in graphic detail in video clips that circulated widely on the internet and television news reports.

A bolt-action rifle believed to be the murder weapon was found nearby, and police released images from surveillance cameras showing a “person of interest” wearing dark clothing and sunglasses.

A break in the case came when a relative and a family friend alerted the local sheriff’s office that he had “confessed to them or implied that he had committed” the murder, Cox said.

“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,” the governor said.

Security camera footage and evidence gathered from the suspect’s profile on the chat and streaming platform Discord also helped investigators link him to the crime, Cox said.

Robinson, a third-year student in the electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College, part of Utah’s public university system, was taken into custody at his parents’ house, about 260 miles (420 km) southwest of the crime scene.

Investigators on Friday evening collected additional forensic evidence from Robinson’s apartment in St George, about 5 miles (8 km) from his parents’ home near the Arizona border.

He was held on suspicion of aggravated murder and other charges that were expected to be formally filed in court early next week, the governor said.

‘Watershed in American history’

The killing has stirred outrage among Kirk’s supporters and condemnation of political violence from across the ideological spectrum.

“It is an attack on all of us,” Governor Cox said, calling Kirk’s murder a “watershed in American history” and comparing it to the rash of US political assassinations of the 1960s.

Cox declined to discuss possible motives for the killing. But in describing inscriptions investigators found on ammunition recovered from the scene, he said one of the casings bore the message: “Here fascist! CATCH!”

“I think that speaks for itself,” he said in response to reporters’ questions.

State records show Robinson was a registered voter but not affiliated with any political party. But a relative told investigators that Robinson had grown more political in recent years and had once discussed with another family member their dislike for Kirk and his viewpoints, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

Many Republicans, including Trump, have been quick to lash out at the political left, accusing liberals of fomenting anti-conservative vitriol that would encourage a kindred spirit to cross the line into violence.

Democrats, decrying political violence more generally while calling for stronger gun laws, have countered that Trump himself routinely uses inflammatory rhetoric to demonise his political foes, judges and the mainstream media.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the symbology found on the bullet casings suggests the shooter was part of the so-called Groyper movement, associated with far-right activist and commentator Nick Fuentes.

Right, left or crazy?

“It’s an eclectic ideological movement marked by video game memes, anti-gay, Nick Fuentes white supremacy, irony,” she said. “It certainly leans right, but it is quite eclectic.”

She added: “In a way, the ideological beliefs of the shooter don’t matter. What matters is how they’re taken by society. And if our society chooses to keep pointing fingers, whether the person turns out to be right, left or just unstable, then the violence will grow from the pointing of fingers, regardless of the act itself.”

Kleinfeld said most perpetrators of political violence were not clearly on one ideological side or another, but typically driven by “a hodgepodge of conspiracy beliefs and mental illness.”

“So it wouldn’t be surprising at all if this person was a person of the far right, if this person was a person who held a variety of different beliefs and was sort of unclassifiable,” she added.

Kirk’s murder comes amid the most sustained period of US political violence in decades. Reuters has documented more than 300 cases of politically motivated violent acts across the ideological spectrum since Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Trump himself has survived two attempts on his life, one that left him with a grazed ear during a campaign event in July 2024 and another two months later foiled by federal agents.

Democrats have fallen victim, too. In April, an arsonist broke into Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence and set it on fire while the family was inside.

Earlier this year, a gunman posing as a police officer in Minnesota murdered Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and shot Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife.

In her first public comments since her spouse was slain, Erika Kirk vowed in a tearful but defiant video message on Friday evening that “the movement built by my husband will not die” but grow stronger.

Speaking from the studio of his radio-podcast show, she urged young people to join Turning Point, exalting her husband as a fallen political hero who “now and for all eternity will stand at his savior’s side wearing the glorious crown of a martyr”.