A friend of Charlie Kirk has delivered a harrowing account of the frantic race through traffic to get the conservative influencer to hospital after he was fatally shot.
Christian author Frank Turek, 63, was in the car with the right wing activist after he was killed during a question-and-answer session at Utah Valley University.
Speaking during an episode of his YouTube show Cross Examined, Turek recounted how he prayed for Kirk and administered him CPR in the back of the car on the way to Timpanogos Regional Hospital in Orem.
But the efforts of the Christian activist were in vain, as the 31-year-old was already with ‘Jesus’ by the time he was in the back of the SUV.
‘Charlie Kirk was literally a son to me,’ Turek said. ‘So, if your son got hit, what would you do? I got in the car – because if there was anyway I could save him, I had to do something.’
The public speaker then described how they drove four miles to the hospital with the door open all the way. ‘Charlie is laid out right in front of me, and Charlie’s so tall we can’t close the door,’ he explained.
Throughout the hectic journey, Turek and the security team desperately attempted to stop the bleeding from Kirk’s neck.
In one of the many graphic videos shared online following the shooting of the high-profile Trump ally, he can be seen bleeding profusely and slumping down off his chair with a clear wound on his neck.
During the dramatic car journey to hospital, Turek yelled: ‘Come on Charlie, come on, come on!’
He described how even though he was visibly panicked, Kirk’s security team managed to keep their cool, ‘calmly but swiftly doing exactly what they were trained to do.’
Then, the group started praying out loud, yelling: ‘Come on! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!’
The driver had difficulty managing traffic because they weren’t travelling on a highway but surface streets.
Suddenly, an ambulance came towards them and there was a conservation in the car about whether they should stop. They decided not to and continue to hospital – a decision the doctor later said was correct.
‘At one point, somebody says, ‘Let’s get there in one piece!’ because we’re cutting through intersections, beeping the horn.’
Turek administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to Kirk but realised it was too late.
‘Charlie wasn’t there, his eyes were fixed. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking past me right into eternity. He was with Jesus already.’
Kirk was killed instantly and felt ‘absolutely no’ pain, Turek was later told by doctors.
‘There was nothing any of us could do about it. We were giving him CPR but nothing was happening. It wasn’t like if we had better first aid or we had better medical facilities or we were faster to the hospital, we could have saved him. We couldn’t.’
He continued between tears: ‘So if that’s any comfort at all, Charlie didn’t suffer. He was gone, he was with Jesus. Absent from the body, present with the Lord.’
Doctors at the hospital managed to get a pulse back, giving the group a small sliver of hope at the last moment.
‘The doctor later said that we got a pulse because Charlie was a very healthy man,’ Turek said. ‘But the shot was catastrophic, so 20 or 30 minutes later the surgeon came out and said he was dead.’
Turek, who calls Kirk his ‘friend and brother in Christ’, said he decided to deliver the first-hand account to abide by the wishes of Kirk’s wife Erika Frantzve, with whom he had a three-year-old daughter and a son, 16 months.
Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old suspect in Kirk’s murder, made his first court appearance on Wednesday via Zoom after allegedly shooting and killing the conservative activist in Utah on September 10.
Robinson was held without bail until his next court hearing on September 29, as Judge Tony Graf granted a pre-trial request to issue Kirk’s wife Erika a protective order.
He wore a vest to prevent self harm and spoke only to confirm his details during the hearing.
Prosecutors unveiled seven charges including aggravated murder and witness tampering and said they were seeking the death penalty.
Kirk, 31, was the co-founder of Turning Point USA and is credited with energising the Republican youth movement and helping President Donald Trump win back the White House in 2024.
He was participating in a ‘Prove Me Wrong’ debate as part of his ‘American Comeback Tour’, answering a question about gun violence in front of a 3,000-person crowd when he was fatally shot.
The killing of the outspoken Republican made international headlines, with the U.S. president condemning the shooting as a ‘heinous assassination’ and an act of ‘political violence’.
