(NewsNation) — Stories of witnesses who were in attendance for conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination continue to come out. For some, the experience will be with them forever.
“I talked about this the other day, in an experience like that, you have two decisions, fight or flight,” a father named Elliott Thorn told NewsNation on Saturday.
Kirk, co-founder of Turning Point USA, was speaking at Utah Valley University when he was hit by a single rifle round fired from a rooftop roughly 200 yards away. Thorn, who was with his wife and baby, says he was just eight feet from Kirk when the shot rang out. He covered his baby with his body to protect the child.
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“For me, the biggest thing that I cared mostly about was my family,” he said.
“As any dad or husband or father or anything would hopefully do, the biggest thing for me was making sure my family was not going to get hit or taken to a place where they were going be unsafe,” he added.
Thorn said Kirk’s murder could be a moment for everyone in the country to learn from.
“We are developing a shame-based society where people are being taught not to feel their feelings and talk about their feelings, and express them, and do all these things,” he said. “And so people are suffering in silence, and we’re having massive blow-ups everywhere.”
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Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was arrested after a 33-hour manhunt. According to authorities, Robinson confessed to a family friend — or “implied that he had committed the murder” — and that person in turn contacted the Washington County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday.
NewsNation sources said Robinson was on the FBI’s radar on Thursday and was initially identified through facial-recognition investigative methods.
Robinson is expected to be formally charged next week, according to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who called Kirk’s murder a political assassination.
