Orem, Utah —
Hunter Kozak saw Charlie Kirk’s gruesome public assassination just a few feet away from him on his college campus. Within hours, he watched through his phone as strangers built an elaborate false narrative about what he’d just witnessed — accusing him of not only wanting the killing but also secretly plotting to make it happen.
Kozak was the last person to ask Kirk a question at Utah Valley University. Kirk toured college campuses and got in political arguments with left-leaning students, and Kozak, a student at UVU, wanted to debate Kirk’s past statements about transgender mass shooters. Even in that moment after the gunshot, Kozak knew seeing Kirk killed would forever be burned into his brain, but there was more.
“I knew that watching someone die while they were in a conversation with me is a very, very, very crazy circumstance that I can’t forget, and that’s going to stick with me. But it took a while for it to catch on … that’s not all I have to worry about,” Kozak said in an interview with CNN nearly a year after the killing. “It certainly feels like the conspiracy theorists have been their own, in a lot of ways, bigger trauma than just watching the assassination.”
Another man, Tyler Robinson, has been charged with aggravated murder and six other counts in Kirk’s death. After the shooting, Kozak spoke to a police officer on the scene, and then a few days later, contacted the FBI to tell what he had witnessed. He said he has had no other contact with law enforcement.
