If he could do it over again, Hunter Kozak says he wouldn’t ask that question.
When he stood at the microphone in Utah Valley University’s courtyard Wednesday, facing Charlie Kirk, he had no way of knowing the next 16 words he said would change his life.
“I had been fluctuating between different ones,” Kozak told The Salt Lake Tribune on Thursday. “Now that I know, for sure I would’ve asked a different one. I just would’ve. 100%.”
He’s since received hundreds of death threats; messages labeling him a terrorist; accusations that he’s part of a conspiracy or the leader of an assassination plot — all because Kirk was responding to Kozak’s ask when the political commentator was fatally shot.
Now, Kozak says, he’s stuck hearing his own words repeat across the internet and replay on major news stations. His phone is so flooded with calls and messages that it’s virtually unusable.
Less than 36 hours after Kirk’s final moments, that single question has torn Kozak’s life apart.
(Screenshot) Pictured is Utah Valley University student Hunter Kozak as he speaks in a video explaining that he was asking conservative commentator Charlie Kirk the final question before Kirk was fatally shot on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025.
The 29-year-old UVU student studying math education and philosophy spoke to The Tribune by phone late Thursday. When he answered, the father of two quipped, “Good timing. I just got off a call with the FBI.”
Minutes before his call with the FBI, a nurse had also called to tell Kozak and his wife that it’s possible their youngest child — a baby girl born Sunday, who remains hospitalized in a neonatal intensive care unit — may have a heart defect.
“I don’t know that this is a day that a human being can handle,” Kozak told The Tribune, his voice cracking.
Kozak said he had been trying to lay low after the event, even as others started to identify him and call him out online, where his popular progressive TikTok account @staxioms has amassed millions of views.
It was partially the stress of the hospital that had led Kozak and his wife to take a break and see Kirk speak.
The two love politics and wanted to challenge Kirk, who had promoted debate as part of his college tour with Turning Point USA. They expected their liberal perspective at the presumably conservative event held in a largely red state might not make for a smooth interaction. They didn’t anticipate becoming viewed as supposed villains in an alleged plot they say they had nothing to do with.
By Thursday, Kozak said, he couldn’t remain quiet any more. “I felt like I had to make it was clear I was advocating for peace,” he said.
It’s what prompted him to break his TikTok silence to his 34,000 followers. “I don’t know how to make this video,” he started. “It’s been a rough 24 hours.”
He then reveals that he was, as he phrases it, “the last person to talk to Charlie Kirk.”
It’s a pleading 3:33-minute clip where Kozak asks for understanding and civility and tries to explain where his question came from.
The post includes a clip of him asking Kirk: “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?”
He looks small in front of the microphone, wearing a gray sweatshirt and thin red wire glasses.
Kirk responds, “Too many.”
Kozak replies the number is five.
Kirk says, “Counting or not counting gang violence?”
Then the pop of a single gunshot rings out.
Kozak told The Tribune that he immediately sensed what happened. “It sounded like a firecracker. I thought it was fired 2 feet away from me, it was so loud.”
He dropped to the ground and looked at the others who’d been waiting to address Kirk, their faces pressed to the grass.
Kozak’s wife, who’d joined him at the event, had been filming Kozak from a spot where they’d earlier stood together before Kozak was moved to the front to speak. He crawled to try to find her and did.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) People react after Charlie Kirk was shot during an appearance at Utah Valley University in Orem on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025.
Before the pair left, Kozak told The Washington Post, he sought out a police officer and provided his contact details, along with the video his wife had been filming. Even then, he was already worried about how it might look — that people would think he was involved.
But law enforcement didn’t contact him until Thursday, he told The Tribune, when he posted his TikTok. He described the conversation as short and friendly.
Kozak said the timing of his question has spurred hundreds, maybe thousands of people to attack him online, he estimates. “Many, many, many,” he said. They posit the shooter was listening for Kozak’s words to fire, two liberals acting in concert.
“I’m absolutely overwhelmed,” Kozak added. “I just saw all those accusations. … I feel angry, but I’m also scared of what anger can lead people to do.”
Kozak said he just wanted to “have a conversation with Charlie about the inaccuracies I thought he was promoting.”
“I wanted to have a debate and conversation with him in the so-called marketplace of ideas,” Kozak continued. “That’s something he believes in. That’s something I believe it.”
In his TikTok, Kozak also included clips from a post he’d made about a week earlier, challenging Kirk for alleging that the suspect in the Aug. 29 Minneapolis shooting at a Catholic school was transgender. It wasn’t his first critique of Kirk.
Kozak says that earlier video was shared with the hope that Kirk could see “that trans people are surprisingly and extremely nonviolent.” When he soon after saw Kirk was coming to his campus, he says, he felt compelled to question Kirk at the event.
Kozak has posted hundreds of videos on his TikTok account over the past three years, examining liberal politics from many angles as part of the “Unf--- America Tour” led by Democrats, run as a counterpoint to Kirk’s Turning Point USA. In one, Kozak interviewed attendees at a different Kirk event.
Since the shooting, he’s been ruminating on all the ways he feels he and Kirk were similar — both passionate, both fathers, both having dropped out of college. (Kozak previously attended nearby Brigham Young University in Provo before leaving for four years and then enrolling at UVU.)
“If my 1-year-old boy, like his 1-year-boy, grew up without memories of his dad …” Kozak says, trailing off in the video.
He adds: “I’m on the record for how much I disagree with Charlie Kirk, but he is still a human being. Have we forgotten that?”
In the aftermath, Kozak told The Tribune, his concern for his and his family’s safety led him to hire an attorney. Hours before authorities announced Friday that a shooting suspect was in custody, Kozak said he hoped for an arrest in the case, too. “It’d certainly get a target off my back,” he added.
He keeps asking himself what the shooter hoped to accomplish. And he can’t stop thinking about his own question.
“I was thinking about the [Jeffrey] Epstein letter that got published. I would’ve wanted to talk to him about that, maybe,” he said. “I think that would’ve been better. But how can any of this get better?”