How Law Enforcement Got the Man Suspected of Killing Charlie Kirk

F.B.I. leaders touted the immense federal deployment assigned to find the assassin. But their big break came with a single tip — from the suspect’s own family.

Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., on Friday described the arrest of the man accused of killing the activist Charlie Kirk as “historic” — a fast-track triumph for law enforcement that proved the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s push to “let good cops be cops.”

The reality was more complicated.

While the federal government, led by the F.B.I., surged investigative manpower and technological firepower — high-tech drones, fingerprint experts, video analysts, evidence processing teams — the hunt for Mr. Kirk’s killer ended in the mundane way that many manhunts do. Someone called in a tip to local law enforcement and identified the suspect, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah man.

“A family member of Tyler Robinson reached out to a family friend who contacted the Washington County Sheriff’s Office with information that Robinson had confessed to them or implied that he had committed the incident,” Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah told reporters on Friday. “We got him.”

What did make the investigation historic was the intense level of federal involvement spurred by the political significance of the man who was killed, and the unfathomable impact of his killing in a divided country sliding from vitriol to violence. Mr. Kirk was close to President Trump, who broke the news of the arrest on Fox. Mr. Patel, a former podcaster, moved in the same conservative circles as Mr. Kirk and considered him a friend.

But it was not clear whether anything the F.B.I. did in the days after the shooting played a decisive role in shortening the search.

Mr. Robinson’s arrest late Thursday in many ways fit the unpredictable pattern of dragnet investigations, which are often resolved through a combination of shoe-leather police work, high-tech forensics and plain luck. They seldom conform to a neat narrative — and are often hampered by miscalculations and missteps before reaching their goal, officials said.

That appears to be the case with Mr. Robinson, who surrendered to local authorities after a frantic 33-hour search that ended 250 miles south of the crime scene.

Mr. Kirk was shot shortly after noon on Wednesday, the sudden attack sending thousands of attendees at his event on the Utah Valley University campus scattering.

The event had been staffed by a modest contingent of campus police officers, along with Mr. Kirk’s security, but there was no major law enforcement presence that would have made it more difficult for the shooter to slip away. The F.B.I. was on the scene within 16 minutes. The bureau mobilized planes, hostage-rescue teams and technicians while flying pieces of evidence to forensic labs on the East Coast.

Near the campus, officers scoured neighborhoods, knocked on doors and looked in possible hiding places — inside chicken coops, on a construction site, in backyards. But the gunman appeared to be long gone.

As the search widened, Mr. Cox and police officials said, the federal government provided important technical and logistical support. Mr. Patel hailed the effectiveness of coordination among all of those involved in the search.

It is possible, current and former officials said, that images of the shooter taken by surveillance cameras at the scene and disseminated on Thursday by federal authorities prompted Mr. Robinson’s family to come forward or convinced Mr. Robinson to surrender.

But it appears to have taken the bureau a half-day longer than necessary to release the images, which were in the possession of F.B.I. agents in Salt Lake City as early as Wednesday night, Mr. Patel complained to his team.

In a testy conference call early Thursday, Mr. Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, called out subordinates for waiting nearly 12 hours to show them the photos — and said they would have released them immediately had they been aware they were available, according to people familiar with the exchange.

Later, when Mr. Patel arrived in Utah that evening to more directly oversee the investigation, he directed the release of video footage of the suspect.

Yet the F.B.I. director himself added to the confusion over the investigation in the hours after Mr. Kirk was killed.

“The subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody,” Mr. Patel wrote on X on Wednesday evening, without vetting the post with his team.

Moments later, local officials at a news conference seemed to suggest that the search for a suspect was ongoing, even though a person of interest was being questioned.

Until Mr. Robinson’s family got involved late Thursday, investigators were still sorting through thousands of tips, unsure who or where the killer might be.

The early arrest that Mr. Patel announced was not the only false start. In the chaotic minutes after the shooting, a local gadfly was taken into custody, but officials later said he was not the gunman. Then the person Mr. Patel had referred to was detained, until the police determined that he had merely been a spectator at the event.

Early on, the actual shooter had run from the rooftop vantage point, jumped off the side of a building and disappeared into the surrounding neighborhood, ditching the bolt-action rifle used in the attack along the way.

The rifle wasn’t found until that night, as investigators scoured the surrounding area for clues.

Several unfired cartridges were found along with the rifle, and soon, media outlets quoting law enforcement officials were reporting that some of them were engraved with “transgender” ideology.

But in the lab, forensic analysts were not finding transgender messaging. Some cartridges expressed opposition to fascism. Another said: “If you read This, you are GAY Lmao.”

As investigators analyzed the available surveillance footage, they began zeroing in on a man who had shown up on campus just before the shooting wearing jeans, a dark shirt, a hat and sunglasses.

To find him, local authorities, who often have deeper contacts in communities than federal agents, were grinding away and growing increasingly anxious at their lack of results. By Thursday evening, hours before the arrest, they acknowledged that none of their leads were particularly promising — and that they were not even sure if the shooter was still in the state.

“We have no idea,” Beau Mason, the commissioner of Utah’s Department of Public Safety, said when a reporter asked where he thought the killer was.

Then the officials, huddled in a command center at the university in Orem and running on little sleep, got a breakthrough: The Robinson family friend contacted the sheriff’s office in Washington County — more than three hours southwest of Orem — to report that Mr. Robinson had either confessed or implied to his family that he had killed Mr. Kirk.

Officers were making their way through a list of 7,000 tips and leads, but this one quickly became the priority, Mr. Mason said, and they worked to substantiate it.

The process of verifying that Mr. Robinson was the suspect they were searching for included re-examining surveillance footage and finding that he had arrived at the university campus that morning.

Officers also spoke with a family member who said that Mr. Robinson had become more political in recent years, had previously mentioned that Mr. Kirk planned to visit Utah Valley University, and had talked about disliking Mr. Kirk’s views, according to law enforcement records.

They interviewed a roommate of Mr. Robinson’s who said that Mr. Robinson had joked on the social media platform Discord about needing to retrieve a stashed rifle and engraving bullets. (It was not immediately clear how much of this part of the investigation occurred before Mr. Robinson’s arrest.)

Law enforcement officers who had been pursuing leads near the campus raced to southwestern Utah on Thursday night, and Mr. Robinson — who does not appear to have a previous history of violence — transported himself to the sheriff’s office there to turn himself in.

“The family and the friend did a great job of helping him come to a positive resolution to turn himself in to avoid any further endangerment to the public,” Mr. Mason said in an interview. “When our investigators got down there, they were able to peacefully make contact with him, and move through that process of making the arrest. He was very compliant with that.”

By 10 p.m., Mr. Robinson was in custody.

Mr. Mason acknowledged that law enforcement had felt intense pressure to capture the shooter quickly. But he also defended the painstaking care given to collecting and analyzing evidence — and said that process, even in the absence of the crucial tip, would have ultimately led to Mr. Robinson.

“I’m confident we would have apprehended him,” Mr. Mason said.

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