An elderly man arrested during the chaotic aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination has been identified as Utah political activist George Zinn.
The 71-year-old Utah resident was initially suspected of being the shooter as he was taken into custody moments after Kirk, 31, was shot in the neck at an event at Utah Valley College on Wednesday.
Officials clarified that Zinn was not the shooter shortly after authorities reversed a notice that said they had a suspect in custody. He was later charged with obstruction and released.
Zinn was seen in footage that swept social media being detained as witnesses hurled abuse at him, with one branding him a ‘monster’ as others yelled: ‘How dare you?’
Separate footage showed Zinn barking back at the crowd to ‘shoot me’, and a cop at the scene was heard saying ‘he said he shot him, but I don’t know’, per the Salt Lake Tribune.
After it became clear that Zinn was not the gunman who killed Kirk, he was identified by Utah residents as a well-known political activist with a number of small-time arrests to his name.
He is known to frequently show up at protests and demonstrations in the state, and Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill told the Tribune that his office has prosecuted Zinn numerous times dating back to the 1980s.
Many of his arrests were for trespassing, Gill said, as he described Zinn as a libertarian conservative who would ‘give me a hard time for being a Dem’.
The District Attorney said he was aware of Zinn from years of political protests in Utah, as at ‘almost every political event you can think of, there was always George somewhere in the background, listening’.
‘He’s a person who can be odd, and has those kinds of odd behavior challenges,’ Gill said, adding that ‘by and large, he’s more of a gadfly than anything else’.
Gill said that his office had tried to get Zinn into mental health court for past misdemeanor charges, but he ‘never really participated in that’.
Zinn’s most serious arrest came in 2013, when he was charged with threatening to plant bombs at the finish line of the Salt Lake City Marathon.
He took a plea deal in the case and initially received a sentence of probation before being ordered to serve a year in jail after violating his probation.
Zinn’s most recent arrest came in May, when he was detained for a misdemeanor charge of ‘pedestrian in roadway’.
In the officer’s report of the incident, Zinn allegedly ‘stated he didn’t care if the vehicles waited all day’.
‘I told George he needed to wait on the sidewalk, and not in the roadway… He told me he did not care, and to take him to jail.’
Zinn was also arrested in January on suspicion of trespassing after he reportedly tried to get into the Sundance Film Festival, from which he was banned.
The Tribune reported that Zinn was also in attendance at political events including Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson’s 2023 ‘State of the County’ address, a 2023 Sutherland Institute event headlined by Senator Mike Lee, and former Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes’s 2020 announcement that he was running for governor.
He was taken into custody in 2019 following a protest in Salt Lake City against the Utah Inland Port Authority, and he was also a courtroom spectator at Kobe Bryant’s sex assault case in Colorado.
And in a bizarre link to the White House, Zinn was said to have slept in a cot in the hotel room of Ronald Reagan’s former education secretary T.H. Bell when he showed up to the Republican National Convention in New Orleans in 1988 without a place to stay.
