The last person to talk to conservative activist Charlie Kirk before he was shot dead by a sniper on a Utah university campus has broken his silence by posting a video to social media giving his version of events and expressing his shock.
“I don’t know how to make this video, it’s been a rough 24 hours,” Hunter Kozak, 29, a mathematics student at Utah Valley University, says in the video first posted to Instagram.
Kozak explains that, before Wednesday’s atrocity, he had posted a video critical of a claim made by the Turning Point USA founder, 31, about transgender people and mass shootings, and had decided to take the opportunity to challenge him about it in person when his “American Comeback” speaking tour arrived on his own campus in Orem, Utah.
Kozak goes on to recap the moment he raised the issue with Kirk, only for the speaker to be struck by a sniper’s bullet, causing his audience to flee the scene in terror, admitting that he has “barely” been able to bring himself to watch the video back.
“First off, you sick f***ing psychos that think this is the answer… um, it’s not. I don’t know what else to say,” Kozak tells his followers.
“It’s f***ing not. It’s awful, and a father doesn’t have his kids anymore. Charlie had two kids and a wife. And, like, not to make this about me, but I have two kids and a wife. And if my one-year-old boy… His one-year-old boy will grow up without memories of his dad.”
He continued: “It’s a tragedy and it’s hard to grapple with, and I’m part of a community that is struggling to grapple with it right now. And people have obviously pointed to the irony that… I was, the point I was trying to make was how peaceful the left was right before he got shot. And that, that only makes sense if we stay peaceful.
“I’m on the record for how much I disagree with Charlie Kirk, but he is still a human being – have we forgotten that? Are we crazy? I stand by so little of everything that he said, but one of the things that he stood by was conversation.”
Kozak goes on to address conspiracy theorists who had implied online, without evidence, that he might have been involved in the attack, given the nature of the question he put to Kirk, telling them: “You are not helping anything.”
“I’ve been talking to the police,” he continued. “We’re good, thank you, and if you’re salivating about what happened, don’t. I don’t know if any of my audience is but, if you are, you’re not part of what I’m trying to do here at all.”
Kirk’s killer has still not been apprehended, although a widespread manhunt is ongoing, with the FBI releasing pictures and video of a “person of interest” leaving the area.
Emotions continue to run high among America’s conservatives, some of whom have demanded consequences for people making light of the incident or gloating about the activist’s fate on social media.
Kirk was about 20 minutes into the event in Orem on Wednesday afternoon when he picked Kozak out of the audience to ask him a question.
“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” the student asked.
“Too many,” Kirk responded to applause from the crowd.
Kozak informed him that the total was five and continued: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?”
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk replied before, just seconds later, he was struck in the neck by the bullet and fell from his chair. He was rushed to the hospital but died of his injury shortly afterwards.
“I wanted to challenge him,” Kozak subsequently told The New York Times, recounting his horrific experience of the day and again expressing sympathy for Kirk’s family.
“I couldn’t have asked a worse question,” he reflected.
