SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Charlie Kirk’s political organization insisted he speak outdoors at the Utah university where he was assassinated, despite security concerns from campus officials who then failed to properly assess dangers including a potential rooftop shooter, according to a report released Friday.
An external review released by Utah Valley University found that the school failed to conduct a formal security assessment, did not create a written event action plan and deferred critical decision-making to Turning Point USA, the Kirk-led organization that scheduled his appearances on college campuses across the U.S.
A charismatic but polarizing figure, Kirk, 31, was killed on Sept. 10, 2025, by a sniper perched on a rooftop more than 400 feet (122 meters) away, authorities said. The conservative activist had been debating students before a crowd of thousands in an outdoor courtyard surrounded by tall buildings and elevated walkways on the campus in Orem, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) south of Salt Lake City. His appearances often attracted protests, further complicating his security.
Tyler Robinson has pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder in Kirk’s killing, a charge that could make him eligible for the death penalty if convicted. Prosecutors say the 23-year-old defendant wrote in a text message about Kirk: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” No trial date has been set.
Kirk’s killing was a watershed moment during a wave of political violence in the United States. President Donald Trump has survived multiple assassination attempts in the past three years, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was gunned down in 2024 and a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were killed at their home in 2025.
Utah Valley President Jon Anderson said in a statement that the school has a responsibility to “learn from the findings of this review, and follow through on its recommendations.”
Last week, Kirk’s family announced a wrongful death notice — a precursor to a possible lawsuit — accusing Utah Valley officials of hastening his death with a string of “reckless decisions.”
They included failing to conduct an adequate risk assessment, failing to establish a secure perimeter and failing to have first responders immediately available, which led to Kirk being taken to a hospital in a private vehicle instead of an ambulance.
The family’s lawyer, Brett Parkinson, said in a statement that the report reaffirms those allegations. By hosting the event, he said, Utah Valley assumed responsibility for the safety of all in attendance, including Kirk.
“The buck stopped with UVU leadership and law enforcement,” Parkinson said. “Justice for Charlie and his family requires true accountability for UVU’s fatal shortcomings that day.”
According to the report, which Utah Valley said was done independently by outside consultants, some university officials expressed reservations in an August 2025 meeting with Turning Point about holding the event in an outdoor space surrounded by tall buildings.
The officials suggested multiple other locations, including some that were indoors. But a Turning Point representative insisted that Kirk speak at a campus courtyard because he had been there previously and the organization was familiar with the location. The university ultimately allowed the event to go forward in the courtyard.
“In our assessment, those decisions were consequential,” the report said.
Turning Point USA deferred to Parkinson’s statement when asked for comment on the findings. The organization and its security team did not respond to several requests to participate in the review, according to the report.
The event location “created significant protective operations considerations,” the report said, but the planning process failed to include a documented line-of-sight assessment, pre-event briefing or walk-through with security stakeholders. Nor was there clear coordination with Kirk's private security team and external law enforcement partners, the report said.
An Associated Press review last year found that the campus did not use several public safety practices that have become standard at events around the country. Campus police did not fly a drone to monitor rooftops or coordinate with local law enforcement to secure the event attended by about 3,000 people. There were no bag checks or metal detectors.
The report also highlighted a lack of coordination and communication between campus police and Kirk’s private security in the days leading up to the event.
In foregoing a day-of walk-through and pre-event briefing, they missed opportunities to go over roles, assess staffing and equipment, add resources such as drones, and address any concerns or threats, the report said.
The university’s police chief sent a text message asking Turning Point’s security supervisor to meet at the event location a few hours beforehand, but no meeting ever happened, the report said.
The report makes nearly 150 recommendations, including hiring a police sergeant to focus on campus events and creating clear criteria for when events must be moved indoors or to more controllable venues.
“This requires humility, an honest examination of our policies and practices, and a commitment to act on what we learn,” said Anderson, who took over as university president last month. He added that the university has made “meaningful progress in strengthening campus safety over the past year.”
That includes hiring a chief public safety officer to coordinate with emergency response agencies and hiring more campus police officers. At the time of the shooting, the university had just 13 sworn officers, which the report said was not sufficient for Utah Valley’s size and the types of events held on the campus. It’s the state’s largest university, with about 50,000 students on a sprawling campus in Orem, beneath the Wasatch Mountains.
Sisak reported from New York. Associated Press reporter Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia contributed.
FILE - Sgt. Jennifer Faumuina, of the Utah Department of Public Safety, motions toward a map of the Utah Valley University campus during a preliminary hearing for Tyler Robinson, who is accused in the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, at the Fourth District Courthouse in Provo, Utah, July 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Spenser Heaps, Pool, File)
FILE - People gaze down at the site where Charlie Kirk was shot, above which hangs an American flag, at Utah Valley University, Sept. 15, 2025, in Orem, Utah. (AP Photo/Jesse Bedayn, File)
FILE - Women pray at a memorial outside Utah Valley University after Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, Sept. 13, 2025, in Orem, Utah. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson, File)
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Three-way talks between Russia, Ukraine and the United States opened Tuesday in Abu Dhabi, the head of Kyiv’s delegation said.
“We have moved to a trilateral negotiation format involving Ukraine, the United States and Russia” after initial Ukrainian discussions with NATO and European envoys, Rustem Umerov, the head of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said on social media.
The U.S. is renewing a push to end the war between Moscow and Kyiv after three rounds of negotiations earlier this year. The conflict, Europe's biggest since World War II, began after Russia's all-out invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
The two-day session in Abu Dhabi, the first such meeting since February, will focus on security guarantees.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, said on X that he and fellow envoy Steve Witkoff were working on a “negotiated solution that can deliver lasting peace and create the conditions for a sovereign, secure, and prosperous Ukraine within a more stable European security environment.”
Umerov said that the day began with a meeting between the Ukrainian team, the U.S. envoys and representatives from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, NATO and the European Commission.
“Next, we will move to a trilateral format involving Ukraine, the United States and Russia,” Umerov said in a social media post.
Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported Tuesday that the Russian delegation had arrived at the site of the talks.
The Russian and Ukrainian governments remain far apart on key elements of any prospective deal to end the full-scale war, now nearing its five-year mark.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine to pull its troops back from Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — the four regions that Moscow illegally annexed in September 2022 but never fully captured. He also demands that Ukraine abandon its bid to join NATO, accept strict limits on its military and drop restrictions on the Russian language and the Moscow-affiliated Orthodox Church in Ukraine.
Putin wants a comprehensive peace deal on those conditions and won’t agree to a general halt in hostilities, arguing that it would only allow Ukrainian troops to rest and replenish their weapons stockpiles. He has warned that Russia will achieve its goals by force if Kyiv refuses to meet its conditions for peace.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was visiting Denmark on Tuesday, rejects Putin’s demands to voluntarily cede territory that Russia hasn't been able to take on the battlefield. Zelenskyy also rejects any limits on Ukraine's military or its arrangements with Western partners, which Kyiv sees as essential security guarantees to stop Moscow from invading again.
Ukraine argues that an immediate ceasefire is the necessary first step toward negotiating a wider settlement and says a direct meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy is the only way territorial issues can be settled.
The Russian and Ukrainian delegations include senior officials who have attended previous rounds of talks.
Russia’s chief negotiator is Putin aide Vladimir Medinsky, who has led Moscow’s team since the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in Istanbul in March 2022. The Russian delegation also includes deputy foreign ministers Sergei Ryabkov and Mikhail Galuzin, military intelligence chief Igor Kostyukov and deputy chief of the General Staff’s operational department, Yuri Zhigarlovsky.
Apart from Umerov, the Ukrainian delegation also reportedly includes Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, his deputy, Sergiy Kyslytsya, and Davyd Arakhamia, the parliamentary faction leader of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party.
Last week, Trump declared that some kind of grand deal about European security was in the works, describing it as “a big agreement” that is “going to involve more than Ukraine.”
Kushner said Monday on X that a “comprehensive and lasting settlement will also require direct engagement between Russia and our European partners on the broader security arrangements that affect them.” The discussions in Abu Dhabi will set the stage for “that engagement to begin in the near future, as part of a broader multilateral process,” he said.
Moscow has praised the broad approach.
“We can only welcome the (U.S.) negotiators on President Donald Trump’s request proposing to put the issue of collective security on top of the agenda of the talks on a Ukrainian settlement,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
Just before Moscow launched the all-out invasion in 2022, it demanded that NATO roll back its deployments in the alliance’s member countries in Central and Eastern Europe, seeing their presence as a security threat. Similar demands will likely be part of any comprehensive peace deal proposed by Russia.
Kushner said that before the start of the three-way talks, he and Witkoff will meet separately with envoys from Ukraine, the European Union, NATO, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy to “continue the close consultation and coordination we have undertaken on European security and Ukraine’s postwar future over the past several weeks.”
Some in the EU see Washington's proposals as too accommodating to Moscow.
Russia has objected to the Europeans’ involvement in the three-way talks, but said that EU representatives could join at a later stage.
While the ground battles have morphed into a war of attrition along the 1,200-kilometer (about 750-mile) front line, Russia and Ukraine have ramped up their long-range strikes with drones and missiles.
Russia has intensified its air campaign against Ukraine’s power grid, seeking to weaken the country’s resolve as winter sets in. Moscow has relied on ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones, taking advantage of Ukraine’s shortage of U.S.-made Patriot interceptors.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has escalated its drone strikes on Russian oil refineries.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, right, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attend a press conference in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, chairs the Security Council meeting in Moscow, Friday, Nov. 6, 2026. (Alexei Babushkin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
First lady Melania Trump speaks as Russia's Commissioner for Human Rights Yana Lantratova, from left, Ukraine's human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, Davyd Arakhamia, lawmaker with President Zelenskyy's Servant of the People's party, and Russian Presidential Envoy Kirill Dmitriev listen during a meeting with Russian and Ukrainian representatives in the Grand Foyer of the White House, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Family members cry beside the coffins of police officers Dmytro Besedin, Mykhailo Buzhenko, Mykola Balanda and Mykhailo Romanov, killed in a Russian airstrike that destroyed an underground school, and Serhii Berezhko and Oleg Dubetskyi, killed in an FPV drone attack in Komyshuvakha, during a farewell ceremony on Khortytsia Island in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Crosses bearing the names of Viktor Fomenko, Natalia Karapetian and Andrii Anikin, killed in a Russian airstrike that destroyed an underground school in Komyshuvakha, lie in a cemetery in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
