By Brad Brooks and Steve Gorman
PROVO, Utah (Reuters) – Utah prosecutors said on Tuesday they will seek the death penalty for the suspect in conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, hours before he was due in court via video feed from jail in his first public appearance since the shooting.
Tyler Robinson, 22, is accused of firing the single rifle shot from a rooftop sniper’s nest that pierced Kirk’s neck last Wednesday on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, about 40 miles (65 km) south of Salt Lake City.
Utah County District Attorney Jeffrey Gray said at a press conference that his office had filed seven counts against Robinson on Tuesday, including aggravated murder, obstruction of justice for disposing of evidence and witness tampering for asking his roommate to delete texts implicating him.
Gray said he had made the decision to seek the death penalty “independently, based solely on the available evidence and circumstances and nature of the crime.”
The killing, captured in graphic video clips that went viral on the internet, sparked denunciations of political violence across the ideological spectrum but also unleashed a wave of partisan blame-casting and concerns that Kirk’s murder might beget more bloodshed.
The suspect was scheduled to appear via video feed from jail later on Tuesday in Utah County Justice Court in Provo.
In court filings on Tuesday, prosecutors detailed some of the evidence gathered against Robinson in the days since the shooting.
Robinson told his roommate, whom Utah Governor Spencer Cox previously also identified as a romantic partner, that Robinson had killed Kirk because he had “enough of his hatred,” and that “some hate can’t be negotiated out,” according to the court documents. He also told the roommate that he had planned the attack for more than a week, the filings said.
DNA found on the trigger of what authorities believe was the murder weapon was linked to Robinson, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors have added aggravating factors to the murder and firearm charges because Robinson is believed to have targeted Kirk based on political views and knew that children would witness the killing, Gray said. Under state law, only aggravated murder can carry the death penalty.
Kirk, the 31-year-old co-founder and head of the conservative student movement Turning Point USA and a key ally of President Donald Trump, was speaking at an event attended by 3,000 people when he was gunned down.
The suspect, a third-year student of an electrical apprenticeship at a state technical college, initially escaped in the pandemonium following the shooting.
He turned himself in on Thursday after a family friend met with him and his parents and convinced him to do so, prosecutors said.
The killing has unnerved Americans who have seen a spike in political violence in recent years, including two attempted assassinations of Trump last year and the assassination of a Democratic state lawmaker in Minnesota this summer, among many other high-profile examples.
Roughly two out of three Americans believe that harsh rhetoric common in politics is encouraging violence, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in the days following Kirk’s murder.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Provo, Utah; Additional reporting by James Oliphant, Julia Harte, Christian Martinez, and Kanishka Sing; writing by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Nick Zieminski)
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