Christian author Frank Turek was in the car with Charlie Kirk and explained in harrowing detail Wednesday what happened in the frantic minutes immediately after the Turning Point USA founder was assassinated.
Moments after Kirk was gunned down at a campus event in Utah, a panicked scramble to save his life unfolded in the back of a black SUV, Turek recounted. Fighting back emotion, Turek reflected on his bond with Kirk.
“This is going to be the hard part, but maybe also the comforting part. Charlie Kirk was literally like a son to me. I have three sons. He was like my fourth son,” Turek said.
Turek described the desperate ride to the hospital and the heartbreaking realization that nothing could be done.
“I’m on one side of the car, the right side, and they’re getting Charlie in. So I run over to the other side, but the guy was dragging him in. They start blocking that entrance. So at that point, I run around to the back,” Turek said. “I pop the back gate open, and I jump in the back. The car lurches forward. Apparently, somebody jumped in the car. The car lurches forward. So I almost fall out of the car, the SUV. Then I grab the thing and close it.”
Turek painted a chaotic and emotional picture of the desperate race to the hospital.
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“There’s five of us in the car now. Justin’s driving. Dan is up front with the GPS. Rick has got him. Rick’s on my left, and Brian is there, and I’m coming over the back seat, and Charlie’s laid out in front, just right in front of me,” Turek said. “And Charlie’s so tall, we can’t, we can’t close the door. We drove four miles, some, I don’t know, it’s four something miles, all the way to the hospital with the door open. To this day, I don’t know how Brian stayed in the car. Because we’re ‘Go, go, go, go, go,’ we’re, you know, we’re trying to do, we’re trying to stop the bleeding. You saw it. And I’m yelling, ‘Come on, Charlie, come on!’”
As the team weaved through traffic on surface streets, cutting through intersections and honking furiously, two of the men tried to stanch the bleeding while others called out to God.
“And I go, we got to start CPR. So I try and start that. Now, Charlie wasn’t there. His eyes were fixed. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking past me right into eternity. He was with Jesus already. He was killed instantly and felt absolutely no pain,” Turek added. “That’s what I was told later. But of course, we had to try. And by the way, there was just nothing, nothing any of us could do about it. We were giving him CPR, but nothing was happening. It wasn’t like if we had better first aid or we had better medical facilities, or we were faster to the hospital, we could have saved him. We couldn’t.”
Turek described the final moments after Kirk was rushed to the hospital.
“He was gone. He was with Jesus, absent from the body, present with the Lord. That’s where he was. Now it is true when we got to the hospital and they started working on him right away, they did get a pulse back. And so Rick and I were just, everyone’s praying. We’re just praying for a miracle. We had a small sliver of hope,” Turek said. “And the doctor later said that we got a pulse because Charlie was a very healthy man, but the shot was catastrophic. So 20 or 30 minutes later, the surgeon came out and said he was dead.”
Authorities said the assassin climbed onto the roof of UVU’s Losee Center and fatally shot Kirk with a single rifle round before fleeing on foot. The FBI launched a two-day manhunt and circulated surveillance images of the suspect, identified as Tyler Robinson.
Investigators found engraved messages on the bullet casings from the rifle used in the shooting, including phrases like “Hey fascist! Catch!” and “If you read this you are gay LMAO,” Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said. They also discovered the phrase “bella ciao,” which matches the title of an Italian song that became a left-wing anthem during World War II, according to George Mason University.
Authorities disclosed new details about the man accused of assassinating Kirk, citing incriminating text messages and his parents’ attempts to persuade him to surrender. Robinson had been in a relationship with a male roommate who was transitioning to a female identity — a detail allegedly shared by Robinson’s mother during an interview with investigators, according to a charging document released that day.
After the shooting, Robinson texted his roommate and directed him to check under his keyboard for a note. The message reportedly read, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I’m going to take it.”
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