A higher power will hand down judgment for the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, his widow Erika Kirk believes, and she doesn’t want a role in deciding whether he should receive the death penalty if he is convicted.
“I do not want this man’s blood on my ledger when I stand before the Lord,” she told Fox News’ Jesse Watters in an interview aired Wednesday evening. “I want the government to decide. It’s Biblical too. Justice will ultimately be served.”
Charlie Kirk, a popular conservative activist, was fatally shot on Sept. 10 while he was speaking during a Turning Point USA event held at Utah Valley University in Orem. Tyler James Robinson, a 22-year-old from Washington County, has been charged with aggravated murder and other counts in Charlie Kirk’s death and is facing a potential death sentence if he is convicted.
Watters’ nearly hourlong interview with Kirk was wide ranging, discussing the couple’s relationship, Charlie Kirk’s personality and work ethic, how he had become more “tranquil” since his two children were born, his legacy and the court case against Robinson.
While Kirk declined to support or oppose a possible death sentence if Robinson is convicted, she tried to dispel conspiracy theories and misinformation she’s seen spreading related to her husband’s death.
“Everyone,” she said, “is trying to figure out — and I don’t blame them — how does this happen? How does somebody become so radicalized where they can justify this in their own head?”
But, Kirk said, she’s seen the evidence and does not believe in the various theories she’s seen being shared. “I trust our team,” she told Watters.
As people post online, she added, “where my heart is just asking for some grace is for the ones who were there that day. They have to relive that every single day.”
Before the shooting
The day before the shooting, Charlie and Erika Kirk were in Arizona. She was going to miss his UVU tour stop on Wednesday to stay with her mother, but planned to join him at the next one on Thursday.
A friend had prayed with them the night before, Kirk said, noting that “it’s no hidden secret that stuff on campus is heating up.”
She said she’d asked him about wearing a bulletproof vest. “He would nod to that and be like, ‘I looked into it,’ but he would always say he wasn’t afraid.”
“Wouldn’t have mattered anyways, if he wore a vest,” she said.
That night, one of their children was restless, so Kirk suggested Charlie Kirk switch bedrooms, she said. He slept in their daughter’s bedroom and their daughter slept with Kirk in their bed, so “you can get a good night’s sleep and be amazing tomorrow,” she recalled telling him.
Charlie Kirk left early that next morning, coming into their room only briefly to retrieve his wedding ring and necklace. “I didn’t get to give him a kiss goodbye,” she told Watters.
The next day, she was at an appointment with her mother when she got the first updates about the event — videos of Charlie Kirk flinging hats into the crowd.
Then she got a phone call from a staffer that her husband had been shot. Kirk said Charlie Kirk died instantly.
After the shooting
Kirk flew that evening to Utah, where the scene at Timpanogos Regional Hospital seemed to be “from a horror movie,” she told Watters.
“Everyone’s shaken,” she said. A police officer suggested she wait to see Charlie Kirk until a mortuary had prepared him for viewing. But Kirk wanted to see her husband, she said, and “give him a kiss.”
Kirk told Watters that Charlie Kirk still looked “so alive.” He was still warm, she said.
She remembered the look on his face — a smirk. It told her Charlie Kirk died doing what he loved and was at peace, but she said it also revealed something else.
“That smirk to me is that look of, ‘You thought you could stop what I’ve built? You thought that you could end this vision? This movement? This revival? You thought you could do that by murdering me. You got my body,’” she said, “‘You didn’t get my soul.’”
Since his death, Charlie Kirk has been hailed as a martyr for his Christian faith. In the interview with Watters, Kirk several times referred to his death as an attack by the “enemy.”
The night before her husband’s funeral, Kirk said, she was thinking about Charlie Kirk’s mission and how he was “trying to save the lost boys of the west.”
“He was trying to save the exact type of individual who” is now accused of having ”murdered him,” she said.
As she thought about this, she said, she felt called to forgive, and she did.
“A lot of people in this world think that forgiveness is a weakness, or that when you forgive you forget, and it’s the exact opposite,” Kirk told Watters. “It’s a form of freedom.”
“The enemy stole my husband,” she said, “and if I didn’t forgive … the enemy would have my heart.”
What’s next
Before this interview, both Utah law enforcement and Robinson’s defense team had asked a judge to limit media coverage of the court case and ban cameras during court proceedings.
Kirk told Watters that she thinks the case should be broadcast.
“There have been cameras all over my friends and family mourning,” she said. “There have been cameras all over me, analyzing my every move. Analyzing my every smile. My every tear.”
“We deserve,” she said, “to have cameras in there.”
For now, 4th District Judge Tony Graf has declined to rule on that request, which was part of a larger legal argument over whether Robinson can wear plain clothes during court hearings instead of a jail jumpsuit. Graf ordered that Robinson can wear his own clothes, and he limited reporters from capturing images or video that show Robinson wearing shackles.
Graf said if attorneys wanted to pursue a camera ban, they must file a new motion. No such motions had been filed as of Wednesday.
Robinson is expected to be in court again on Jan. 16, which will be the first time he will be in person in a Provo courtroom. Previously, he has appeared via a video feed from the jail.