‘It was one of us’ — Gov. Spencer Cox and fellow Utahns come to terms with a suspected assassin in their midst

For the 33 hours it would take police and FBI investigators to pore over evidence and pursue thousands of tips that would lead them to the suspected gunman in the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Gov. Spencer Cox repeated one prayer: Don’t let the perpetrator be from Utah.

The governor hoped to comfort Utahns with the notion that one of the state’s own did not pull the trigger.

“But it did happen here,” Cox said during a news conference Friday when he announced the arrest, “and it was one of us.”

Late Thursday, police apprehended 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, a resident of the southwestern Utah city of Washington. The realization that the shooter was homegrown sent ripples across a state that prides itself on being nice, polite, with good families and strong communities. Now Utahns are left trying to square that ideal with the brutality exhibited by Kirk’s killer.

“I hope this never represents what Utahns do,” said Zac Wilson, former chair of the Utah Young Republicans and a Brigham Young University graduate. “And I hope this doesn’t become our legacy.”

A ‘wake-up call’

Jack Davis, president of the Utah Young Democrats, called Kirk’s shooting a “wake-up call” for the state.

“There’s sometimes a sense of complacency in Utah — because we are a little bit different, because we do things a little bit differently — that we are immune from the rest of the troubles and challenges that every other state in the country faces,” said Davis, also a BYU grad. “...We aren’t immune in any magic way. We have to make a conscious choice here, just like every other person in every other state does, because what we are seeing is it can absolutely happen here.”

Wilson and Davis were among the featured speakers at a Utah Bridge Builders news conference Friday at the state Capitol. The nonpartisan coalition featured Republican and Democratic state and community leaders and emphasized the need for political discourse and the protection of freedom of speech.

Kirk’s visit to Orem’s Utah Valley University was part of a national collegiate tour for his Turning Point USA organization. The 31-year-old typically engaged in a question-and-answer format during the stops and was responding to a question about mass shootings when he was shot.

Kirk’s rhetoric

Kirk’s comments were often inflammatory. He labeled the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “a mistake” and said that Black women, including former first lady Michelle Obama, the late Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, were “affirmative action picks.” He also called for “a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor” and dismissed empathy as a “made-up, new age term” that “does a lot of damage.”

Still, because of his willingness to debate his convictions, some have equated Kirk’s death to an assault on freedom of speech.

On Friday, Cox, who in recent years has adopted the mantra “Disagree Better,” cast the conservative commentator in the light of a peacekeeper rather than an antagonist.

“Charlie said, ‘‘When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence,’” the Republican governor remarked. Cox added that “we will never be able to solve all the other problems, including the violence problems that people are worried about, if we can’t have a clash of ideas safely and securely.”

Cox’s comments were widely lauded for not placing the blame on any particular group and striving to tamp down the heated rhetoric of the moment.

“Governor Cox is providing the type of leadership that Americans from both sides of the political divide are desperately looking for,” said Adam Phillips, CEO of Interfaith America, a Chicago-based group seeking to promote pluralism. “… We need more bridge builders like Governor Cox in our body politic.”

Thomas Griffith, a Latter-day Saint and retired federal appellate, echoed that sentiment.

“He has been teaching us what Abraham Lincoln taught — that we won’t be able to preserve the Constitution and our republic unless we stop treating our fellow citizens as enemies and instead see them as friends,” he said. “Friends who may have very different views than we do, but who should be treated with dignity and respect.”

Make changes ‘from the ground up’

Former Utah Rep. Becky Edwards, a Republican, compared the moment to 9/11, which occurred almost 24 years to the day before Kirk was shot. After the terror attacks, she noted, national leaders stepped in to unite the country.

She doesn’t expect that to happen now.

“If we’re waiting for that moment, we’re living in the wrong moment,” said Edwards, a social worker by profession. “So we have to create those moments and our solutions in a different model. And that really, very, very much is from the ground up.”

It will take time, and it will take hard conversations. But if anyone can do it, Edwards said, Utahns can.

“That tenacity to continue to work together is very, very Utah,” she said. “So this has been a catalyst for returning to our roots and doing some of the things that we have been doing in the past in this collaborative nature.”

Then again — as Tamu Smith, a Black Latter-day Saint in Utah County suggested in a social media post — maybe that isn’t Utah. Maybe it never was.

Smith wrote that she was appalled by Cox saying he was “praying” that the shooter not be “one of us.”

“Who is ‘us’?” Smith wrote. “A white man? A Mormon man? Someone from Utah? Or is it all of the above? Hoping it was someone from another state. Another country. Another faith. Anybody but his own. Wow.”

“It may not be ‘who we want to be,’” Smith said in an interview, ”but it is exactly who we are.”

Doug Andersen, spokesperson for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said he “can confirm that [Tyler] Robinson became a member of the church at a young age.” He referred any “further inquiry about his church activity to him or his family.”

Kristin Schwiermann, a neighbor of the Robinsons, said she attended the same Latter-day Saint ward, or congregation, as the family.

“When they were younger, they went to church,” she said. “They didn’t stay very active.”

For his part, Cox held out hope that this tragic episode could be a “turning point” for the state and the country — if people choose a peaceful path.

“I still believe that there is more good among us than evil,” he said, “and I still believe that we can change the course of history.”

— Tribune reporter Brooke Larsen contributed to this story.