The elderly man detained after apparently falsely admitting to shooting Charlie Kirk is a known political agitator with a string of bizarre arrests dating back to the 1980s, according to reports.
George Zinn — the 71-year-old police hauled away in viral footage minutes after Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University Wednesday — is known in local political circles as a strange man who frequently appears at events, and almost as frequently is tossed out.
“Almost every political event you can think of, there was always George somewhere in the background, listening,” Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill told the Salt Lake Tribune.
And Zinn has a habit of causing disruptions at those events with protests that are often nonsensical and have a dubious connection to his conservative and libertarian views.
“He’s a person who can be odd, and has those kinds of sometimes odd behavior challenges,” said Gill, whose office has prosecuted Zinn several times. “But by and large, he’s more of a gadfly than anything else.”
Zinn’s face filled social media in the confusion after Kirk was gunned down Wednesday when footage emerged of him being hauled away by police with his pants around his ankles on the Utah campus.
“He said he shot him, but I don’t know,” one officer told the crowd, which was under the impression Zinn was the shooter and yelled and swore at him as he went by.
Police later announced Zinn was not a suspect in the case, but he was still charged with obstruction.
But it was only the latest bizarre arrest Zinn has brought on himself.
Last October, he was arrested in Ogden after he walked into the middle of a street and refused to leave.
“George 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,” the arresting officer wrote in a report obtained by the Tribune. “He told me he did not care, and to take him to jail.”
Zinn has numerous trespassing arrests to his name, stemming mostly from disturbances at public events like local film festivals, protests, and political rallies.
His most alarming arrest came in 2013 after he threatened to bomb the Salt Lake City Marathon. He spent a year in prison for that incident.
Zinn’s supposed comments and arrest at the Kirk shooting seem to be yet another incident in a long life of bizarre behavior — which has left prosecutors recommending mental health treatment in the past, but that Zinn has largely ignored, the Tribune reported.
A second person of interest was also detained after Kirk’s shooting — with FBI Director Kash Patel personally announcing that person who’d killed Kirk was in custody — only for that person to be cleared and released less than two hours later.
The gunman remains in the wind more than 24 hours after Kirk’s assassination.