Last Person to Speak with Charlie Kirk Addresses 'Rough 24 Hours': 'It's a Tragedy' By Angel Saunders 14

The last person to speak with Charlie Kirk just seconds before he was fatally shot in Utah has broken his silence. 

On Thursday, Sept. 11, just one day after the right-wing media personality who founded conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA was shot and killed at Utah Valley University at the age of 31, the student who asked Kirk’s final question shared a message for the public. 

“I don’t know how to make this video, it’s been a rough 24 hours,” Hunter Kozak said in a video posted to his Instagram account.

In the green screen TikTok-style clip, Kozak faced the camera as he showed photos taken at the campus event of him speaking with Kirk from the audience as the podcaster took questions from students. 

To give “background” of why he was at the event, Kozak said that a week or two before the shooting, he made a video calling Kirk out for past comments about “the suspected Minneapolis school shooter” and trans people. 

Kozak’s initial video quoted Kirk as responding, “First Nashville, now this. How many times makes a trend?” 

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“Probably the only way to do this is to have an unGodly amount of time to parse through all of the 6,000 mass shootings that have ever happened in the history of America,” Kozak replied in his video ahead of the deadly shooting. 

He added that after scrolling through Kirk’s content, Kozak “noticed that he was touring America, and he was touring universities, specifically. And one of these caught my eye because one of these is the university I’m currently going to.”

Kozak cut back to after the shooting at Utah Valley University took place. 

He added that he would not be showing footage of the incident, but instead shared a transcript CNN provided from their conversation just seconds before the shooting. 

“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” Kozak asked Kirk.

“Too many,” Kirk responded.

Kozak told Kirk only five transgender Americans have been involved in mass shootings over the last 10 years.

Kozak then asked Kirk if he knew how many mass shooters America had seen in the last 10 years. 

“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk replied. He was then fatally shot. 

Though Kozak made it clear in the weeks before the shooting that he did not agree with Kirk’s views, Kozak also condemned the shooter and those who made comments in poor taste. 

“First off, you sick f—— psychos that think this is the answer, it’s not. I don’t know what else to say,” Kozak said, calling Kirk’s manner of death “awful.” 

“Charlie had two kids and a wife, and not to make this about me, but I have two kids and a wife,” he said in the video, later adding, “It’s a tragedy and it’s hard to grapple with.”

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Kirk married podcaster and former Miss Arizona USA Erika Frantzve in 2021 and the couple have two children: a girl born in 2022 and a boy born in 2024.

Kozak asked for everyone to “stay peaceful” following Kirk’s death.

“He is still a human being, have we forgotten that?” the student said. 

Since the shooting, the FBI has released surveillance images of a person of interest, but that individual remains at large.