The Utah university where Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September released a report on Thursday examining the security pitfalls in advance of Kirk’s murder. The independent security review determined that the employees of Utah Valley University did not “act in bad faith or in willful and wanton disregard” ahead of the event, but…
Page A2From§Eachthe late evening edition — 25 September 2026
Utah names Sept. 10 'Charlie Kirk Day,' review finds its own security failed him that same day
As it ran on the front
You have to hand it to somebody. I don't know whose desk it landed on — the governor's office, the university's, doesn't matter — but they had the proclamation ready and the arena ready for the same Thursday, September 10th, and neither one stepped on the other. The governor stood up and said, I wrote this down, "One year ago today, Charlie Kirk came to Utah to take part in a fundamental American tradition: speak openly, debate ideas, and persuade others." Same evening, thousands packed a campus arena to hear that again. That's not two offices bumping into each other by accident. That takes somebody keeping a calendar.
So when I read the report this week, I figured, well, an operation that tight probably had its paperwork in order too. A hundred and fifty-eight pages. I've got the relevant part somewhere — hang on — here: university staff and security personnel "deferred critical decisionmaking" to the Turning Point USA team, and failed to conduct "a formal written security" — and that's where my copy of it cuts off, right at the word security. I don't know what comes after that word. Nobody handed me the rest of the sentence.…
…(cont) I know what I keep in my glovebox, though. Registration, insurance card, the little laminated thing that tells you what to do if the airbag light comes on. None of it is useful the day you need it if you wrote it down after. That's the whole point of a glovebox — the paper's in there before the accident, not drafted afterward to explain the accident. A security plan works the same way, I'd think. You'd want it written before the guest speaks, not assembled into a report a year later describing what wasn't written.
So: no formal written plan, but also no bad faith. Both of those are in the same 158 pages. I'm not a lawyer. I just find it interesting that a place can have no plan and no blame sitting on the same page.
Same day — September 16th — the family filed a notice of claim, the first step toward a lawsuit, naming Utah, the university, the university police department, and other officials.
So I've got a calendar that runs like a Swiss watch — proclamation and ceremony, same night, no stepping on each other — and I've got a security operation that, by the university's own review, had nobody assigned to make the calls and nothing written down for the day it mattered. Both of those came out of the same building.
Oh — hold on, one more thing, before you go. The review clears the employees of bad faith in the same document that says there was no formal written plan for the day Charlie Kirk was shot on their campus. If there's nothing in writing, there's nothing a court can point to and call bad faith. I'm just asking — is that the kind of thing an organization plans for in advance, the same way it plans a proclamation for a Thursday? Or is that the one part of the calendar nobody put in writing on purpose?
“They had the ceremony scheduled and the proclamation signed for the same night, down to the hour — that's not an accident, that's a team that knows how to run a calendar. Now read the review: no formal written security plan, staff handing the actual decisions to Kirk's own event team, and the university still walks out cleared of bad faith. You can be organized enough to fill an arena and still not organized enough to write down who's in charge of the metal detectors — funny how it's always the paperwork that protects the institution that goes missing.”
“Look, the independent review is crystal clear — no bad faith, no willful and wanton disregard, that's their own language, so this is really just a story about process improvements going forward. Sure, staff deferred the actual security calls to Turning Point's own team instead of, you know, the security professionals, but that's — that's a partnership model, that's stakeholder trust. Did I just call letting the client run their own security a "partnership model"? That one's not going to hold up in the notice of claim, is it.”
The receipts
A report released Friday shows Utah Valley University (UVU) had several security issues on the day political commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated on campus. The 158-page independent review for UVU stated that university staff and security personnel deferred critical decisionmaking to the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) team and failed to…
· Charlie Kirk’s family one step closer to lawsuit against Utah and university where he was killed from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· Security failed Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, Erika claims from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· Charlie Kirk supporters vow to ‘continue what he started’ during emotional Utah Valley University ceremony one year after his murder from the morgue, 11 Sep 2026
· Utah governor designates Sept. 10 as 'Charlie Kirk Day' 1 year after assassination from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.