Chaos broke out at Utah Valley University when prominent right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was shot dead in front of thousands of people.
Mr Kirk, 31, was speaking to students about mass shootings on Wednesday when he was shot in the neck, leading students to flee and a manhunt for the killer beginning.
Many questions remain, with differing accounts and multiple videos across social media.
The Sky News Data and Forensic team has tracked and mapped the events before, during and after the killing to find out as much as possible about what happened.
When and where did the shooting happen?
Mr Kirk was speaking to around 3,000 people from under a small white tent on the campus when he was shot.
The event was part of his “prove me wrong” series, which saw the right-wing influencer visit campuses across the country and debate contentious subjects like gun control, free speech, LGBTQ+ rights and abortion rights with left-wing students.
The event began at roughly 12pm local time.
Mr Kirk was taking questions about mass shootings and gun violence when, at roughly 12.20pm, he was shot.
It was a single shot that struck him in the neck, a university spokesman confirmed.
Charlie Kirk at a university event before he was fatally shot. Pic: Reuters/Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune
Madison Lattin, who was standing only a few dozen feet to the left of Mr Kirk when he was shot, said: “Blood is falling and dripping down, and you’re just like so scared, not just for him but your own safety.”
Footage from the scene showed Mr Kirk being carried away within seconds of the shooting.
Where did the shot come from?
In a statement on Thursday, the FBI said they had tracked the gunman’s movements onto the campus, “through the stairwells, up to the roof, across the roof, to a shooting location”.
They said they first tracked his movements from 11.52am, when they said he arrived on campus.
Videos from the event show the gunman was on top of the Losee Centre building – just over 130m away from where Kirk was speaking, according to an online measuring tool.
Two videos show a figure on the roof before and immediately after a shot is fired.
The first video shows what appears to be someone lying down. The person filming says “he just ran from over there” – pointing in the direction of a stairwell coming up the roof.
The second video is filmed in the moments after the shot is fired. You see a silhouette that appears to stand and move away from the roof’s edge.
Using videos taken near the stage, Sky News was able to confirm that this position has a direct line of sight to where Kirk was sitting at the time of the attack.
Audio analyst Rob Maher has estimated the distance the shot travelled, reaching a similar conclusion to Sky News’ analysis.
“The time gap between the crack sound and the pop sound in the recordings close to the podium is about 240 milliseconds,” he told Sky News.
“Since the exact trajectory of the bullet and the bullet’s speed is not known, I have to make an assumption that the bullet speed was likely about 800 meters per second. With that assumption, the time gap indicates that the firearm was likely about 140m from the podium”.
Pic: Rob Maher
What weapon was used?
The weapon suspected of being used in the shooting has been found, according to FBI agent Robert Bohls, who told a news briefing in Orem, Utah, that it was a “high-powered, bolt-action rifle”.
“That rifle was recovered in a wooded area where the shooter had fled,” he said. “The FBI laboratory will be analysing this weapon.”
Mr Bohls added that they also found an “impression of a palm print and forearm imprints for analysis”; however the shooter remained at large.
Firearms consultant David Dyson told Sky News that, based on the range from where they are believed to have fired, the gunman would likely need to be a somewhat skilled target shooter.
But he suggested that while the shot may be difficult for anyone without experience, it’s “not a great range” for someone with practice.
“There’s target disciplines, for instance, [at] 800m. So you can shoot quite accurately at far greater distances than 150 yards,” he said.
“If we’re in that sort of ballpark, then you’re not looking at somebody with phenomenal skill,” he added.
What do we know about the shooter?
A manhunt is under way for the killer, which began on the university campus but has now extended beyond.
Police radio recordings show the first mention of the incident at 12.26pm, about six minutes after the shooting occurred.
Officers were on the scene within minutes, with one officer describing the suspect at 12.35pm as “wearing jeans, black shirt, black mask, long rifle”.
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Audio recording of police response after Charlie Kirk shot
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Police audio after the incident
By 12.58pm, 32 mins after the shooting, armed officers could be seen checking the perimeter of the Losee building.
In an update on Thursday, authorities offered a few more details about the shooter, who they referred to as a male.
Beau Mason, commissioner of the Department of Public Safety, said he “appears to be of college age” and that he “blended in well with a college institution”.
The authorities added they were “doing everything we can to find him” but that “we’re not sure how far he has gone yet”.
The person of interest the FBI is looking for. Pics: FBI Salt Lake City/X
The FBI later released images of a “person of interest” in the shooting.
Two people were arrested after the shooting, but neither was determined to have any connection with the shooting and were later released.
What sort of security was on site?
Witnesses have spoken about a supposed lack of security checkpoints, with people being able to walk into the event with backpacks without being searched.
“Anybody in the world could park anywhere around the university and walk right in,” one witness told Sky News affiliate NBC news.
Read more:
Who was Charlie Kirk? The young MAGA influencer ‘admired’ by Trump
Killing of MAGA icon could be a moment of jeopardy for America
The UVU website states that “generally, anyone is allowed to enter areas that are open to the public” but non-public areas are restricted by “access cards, locked doors, or monitored entryways”.
A 2012 drone video shows the area around the shooter’s location on the 4th floor. A metal railing encloses an accessible balcony area which means that to reach the roof where the shot was taken, they could have climbed or jumped over the railing.
Pic: Eric Fowkes
Extra security measures were put in place for the event. UVU Police Chief Jeff Long said six police officers were there as well as plainclothes police officers in the crowd.
Chief Long confirmed that Mr Kirk also had a security team, which travels with him, and said he coordinated with Mr Kirk’s lead security officer.
Analysis of the videos from the event show at least four men, who appear to be Kirk’s security team, surrounding the stage.
“We train for these things, and you think you have these things covered,” Chief Jeff Long said in his statement last night.
“You try to get your bases covered and unfortunately today we didn’t”.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and Co-Founder of Swedish fintech Klarna, gives a thumbs up during the company’s IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., Sept. 10, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
LONDON — It’s been a busy week for the European technology sector.
On Tuesday, London-headquartered artificial intelligence startup ElevenLabs announced it would let employees sell shares in a secondary round that doubles its valuation to $6.6 billion.
Then, Dutch chip firm ASML on Wednesday confirmed it was leading French AI firm Mistral’s 1.7 billion-euro Series C funding round at a valuation of 11.7 billion euros ($13.7 billion) — up from 5.8 billion euros last year. Mistral is considered a competitor to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
To cap it off, Swedish fintech firm Klarna on Thursday debuted on the New York Stock Exchange after a long-awaited initial public offering. Klarna shares ended the day at $45.82, giving it a market value of over $17 billion.
These developments have revived hopes that Europe is capable of developing a tech industry that can compete with the U.S. and Asia. For the past decade, investors have been talking up Europe’s potential to build valuable tech firms, rebuffing the idea that Silicon Valley is the only place to create innovative new ventures.
However, dreams of a “golden era” of European tech never quite came to fruition.
A key curveball came in the form of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which caused inflation to soar and global central banks to hike interest rates as a result. Higher rates are considered bad for capital-intensive tech firms, which often need to raise cash to grow.
Ironically, that same year, Klarna — which at one point was valued as much as $45.6 billion in a funding round led by SoftBank — had its market value slashed 85% to $6.7 billion.
Now, Europe’s venture capital investors view the recent buzz around the region’s tech firms as less of a renaissance and more of a “growing wave.”
“This started 25 years ago when we saw the first signs of a European tech ecosystem inspired by the original dotcom boom that was very much a Silicon Valley affair,” Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton Capital, told CNBC.
Balderton has backed a number of notable European tech names including fintech firm Revolut and self-driving vehicle tech developer Wayve.
“There have been temporary setbacks: the 2008 financial crisis, the post-Covid tech slump, but the ecosystem has bounced back stronger each time,” Chandratillake said.
“Right now, the confluence of a huge new technological opportunity in the form of generative AI, as well as a community that has done it before and has access to the capital required, is, unsurprisingly, yielding a huge number of sector-defining companies,” he added.
Europe vs. U.S.
Investors backing the continent’s tech startups say there’s plenty of money to be made — particularly amid the economic uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.
For one, there’s a clear discount on European tech right now. Venture firm Atomico’s annual “State of European Tech” report last year pegged the value of the European tech ecosystem at $3 trillion and predicted it will reach $8 trillion by 2034. Compare that to the story in the U.S., where the tech sector’s biggest megacap stocks combined are worth over $20 trillion.
“Ten years ago, there wasn’t a single European startup valued at over $50 billion; today, there are several,” Jan Hammer, partner at Index Ventures, which has backed the likes of Revolut and Adyen, told CNBC.
“Tens of thousands of people now have firsthand experience building and scaling global companies from companies such as Revolut, Alan, Mistral and Adyen,” Hammer added. “Crucially, European startups are no longer simply expanding abroad — they are born global from day one.”
Amy Nauikoas, founder and CEO of fintech investor Anthemis, suggested that investors may be viewing Europe as something of a safe haven market amid heightened geopolitical risks and macroeconomic uncertainty.
“This is an investing opportunity for sure,” Nauikoas told CNBC. “Macroeconomic dislocation always favors early-stage entrepreneurial disruption and innovation.”
“This time around, trends in family office, capital shifts … and the general constipation of the U.S. institutional allocation market suggest that there should be a lot more money flowing from … global investors to U.K. [and] European private markets.”
Problems remain
Despite the bullish sentiment surrounding European tech, there remain systemic challenges that make it harder for the region’s tech firms to achieve the scale of their U.S. and Asian counterparts.
Startup investors have been pushing for more allocation from pension funds into venture capital funds in Europe for some time. And the European market is highly fragmented, with regulations varying from country to country.
“There’s really nothing that stops European tech companies to scale, to become huge,” Niklas Zennström. CEO and founding partner of early Klarna investor Atomico, told CNBC.
“However, there’s some conditions that make it harder,” he added. “We still don’t have a single market.”
Several tech entrepreneurs and investors have backed a new initiative called “EU Inc.” Launched last year, its aim is to boost the European Union’s tech sector via the formation of a “28th regime” — a proposed pan-European legal framework to simplify the complex regulations across various individual EU member states.
“Europe is in a bad headspace at the moment for quite obvious reasons, but I don’t think a lot of the founders who are there really are,” Bede Moore, chief commercial officer of early-stage investment firm Antler, told CNBC.
“At best, what you can say is that there’s this secondary tailwind, which is that people are feeling galvanized by the need for Europe to … be a bit more self-standing.”
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