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It began as something between a debate and a pep rally.

Charlie Kirk’s American Comeback tour promised an unusual jolt of energy to usually placid Orem, where few political spectacles disturb the rhythms of “Family City USA.” The morning of September 10 broke bright and clear over Utah Valley University—as it nearly always does in the high desert of the Great Basin—and by midday a crowd of thousands had packed into the sunlit courtyard, spilling onto rooftops and walkways. Protesters picketing the event with “Free Palestine” signs and pride flags jostled with conservative youth in “Make America Great Again” hats. The atmosphere was jovial, as attendees swapped jokes and made bets about who was going to make a fool of themselves when Charlie opened the mic to questions.

Unbeknownst to them, an otherwise unremarkable state college was about to claim a place in American political history.

At the center was Kirk himself, entering just after noon. Students surged around him in the amphitheater-like plaza, straining for a glimpse. “We’re going to be here for a few hours,” he told them. 

It was a prophecy that would be broken within half an hour.

From across the courtyard, a single rifle shot cracked the air. The bullet struck Kirk in the neck, killing him almost instantly. For a moment the crowd froze in disbelief, then dissolved into screaming chaos—bodies pushing toward the exits or diving behind the nearest concrete barrier. The handful of police officers on site shouted in vain, their commands swallowed by the human stampede.

As the bewildered officers rushed onto what had suddenly become a crime scene, a figure emerged from the receding tide of fleeing attendees: an aged, bald man with wire-rim glasses, wearing a rumpled blue shirt and faded black jeans. “I shot him, now shoot me!” he shouted. Instead, they tackled him and cuffed his wrists as his loose pants slid to his ankles, while furious bystanders spat “How dare you!” in his face.

Meanwhile, the real assassin, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson of St. George, slipped down from the rooftop of the Losee Center, ditched his rifle in the bushes, and drove away unnoticed. As he left, he fired off texts to his roommate and romantic partner, Lance Twiggs. “I had enough of his hatred,” he wrote. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

The defiant old man in police custody was George Zinn, 71 years old, frail, confused, and almost pitiful. “He says he’s the shooter,” one officer muttered as they led him away, “but I don’t know.”

George Zinn woke up on the morning of September 10, 2025 alone, as he always did. He had no idea that by that evening, his image would be splashed across televisions, laptops, and smartphone screens nationwide. He did, however, know that he would be at UVU later that day when Charlie Kirk set up his debate tent on campus. After all, he went to everything.

Ask anyone in Utah politics about George Zinn, and eventually those words will come out of their mouth. For decades, George was an active presence at seemingly every event in the state, especially those put on by the Utah Republican Party. “Every major political event I’ve ever been at, George has been there,” one state representative told me. “Everyone knows who he is. He's just an old man that goes to everything. He’s also crazy, and everyone kind of always goes, ‘Oh, that’s George!’”

Politics, especially local politics, has a way of attracting interesting people. Normal people spend their time taking their family to the park or watching Netflix, not canvassing delegates to support an amendment to a party platform few people will ever read. But George stood out even among the odd crowd that runs your local Republican Party precinct by the sheer volume and tenacity of his appearances. If something was happening, George, somehow, would know about it and find his way inside—even if, maybe especially if, he wasn’t supposed to be there.

“George knows every elected official in the state—every one of them,” Spencer Stokes, one former Utah Republican Party officer, told me. He first met George in the mid-’90s, and had run into him at nearly every political event since. “They all know who he is; he knows them. They talk to him; he talks to them. He has a way of worming his way in to get to them.” 

George had no sense of boundaries. He loved meeting politicians, athletes, any famous person he could manage to get in contact with. And he was good at it. In 1988 George somehow showed up at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, although he was not part of the Utah delegation and had no place to stay; Terrel Bell, who had been secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, brought a cot into his hotel room and let George sleep in it. George managed to bypass security at private events hosted by high-profile politicians, and also at the Salt Lake Winter Olympics in 2002. He popped up in Colorado at the Kobe Bryant trial and was quoted by ESPN Online. Anywhere something interesting was going on, George could find a way to make himself a part of it.

In a way, it was the only thing he had.

As a child, George Zinn had been adopted from Greece by a Latter-day Saint family and raised in Utah. In his youth, he had been an active member of the Mormon Youth Symphony and Chorus, and toured with the group for its performances throughout the United States. The tours set the tone for the rest of his life: He had picked up the habit, and the knack, of being “backstage.”

It was not something that was much appreciated. “George was in the Mormon Youth Symphony and Chorus in his younger years, and he liked to go to the Tabernacle Choir concerts. He would try to go sit up in the choir loft and sing with them, which is not something you do,” Stokes said. Further conflicts with church officials and at church events followed—including at least one serious physical confrontation after George refused to leave when asked—and eventually it became too big of a problem for the church to ignore. The law was invoked and the trump card played, and George was trespassed from all church property. By the time he was arrested in September, he’d been estranged from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, under penalty of law, for decades.

It was a hard blow, and made George essentially an outcast. His adoptive parents died early, and he had no other connections or family. The ban from church property had completed his isolation; he had no other friends or society to turn to. An unstable personality, he couldn’t even hold a job. “George is completely alone on the planet,” Stokes told me.

Utah is a hard place to be alone.

On July 24, 1847, a desperately ill Brigham Young propped himself up from his sickbed in a heavy pioneer wagon and looked down from the mouth of Emigration Canyon over the Salt Lake Valley. “This is the place, drive on,” the new leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known to everyone then and now as “the Mormons”) supposedly remarked, and thus inaugurated the arduous work of building Zion—a holy society—in the mountains of the American West.

Zion, the recently-martyred Joseph Smith had told his followers, was the name of a city founded by the biblical prophet Enoch; a society that, under Enoch’s leadership, lived the divine law so perfectly that it was taken up into heaven to dwell in the presence of God forever.

And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them.

Reality has never quite lived up to the vision: Early experiments with communal settlement slowly petered out, the U.S. federal government stamped harshly on territorial independence, and dissenters from within and Gentiles from without made their homes in the hills and valleys alongside the Saints. But, outside of Salt Lake City proper, the towns and cities of Utah still largely mark the hours to the rhythm of the old-time religion.

For George, being barred from that world meant more than losing his spot on a pew. It was, in a way, exclusion from Zion itself, from the collective heartbeat of his society. While his neighbors walked to church, George sat at home alone. While other men his age volunteered as clerks or teachers, mixing with other church members at classes and picnics, George drifted at the edges of political events, awkward and tolerated, but never embraced. The very intensity of Utah’s communal life made his estrangement all the more painful. 

While George begged his way back into every room that would have him, Tyler Robinson and Lance Twiggs went the other way. Both had been raised in the thick weave of Mormon society, only to reject it as adolescents. Twiggs was no longer even welcome in his home: His parents forced him out at 17, unable to tolerate his open hostility to their faith and his descent into drugs, alcohol, and experiments with transgender expression. They sent him to live in another house they owned—free to live as he liked, but cut off from the family hearth. Robinson soon joined him there, and the two found an erotic solace in each other—something that would have been frowned on in mainstream Utah culture, which rejects, albeit usually politely, homosexual relationships and transexualism. Their bond revolved around pornography, video games, and social media: escapes from the society they rejected and that in turn rejected them.

Utah produces both kinds of exile. Some, like George, claw endlessly for belonging. Others, like Tyler and Lance, define themselves in opposition.

A homogeneous society is a great benefit for the vast majority of its citizens, who are capable of appreciating the benefits of living among a people that may at least somewhat approach the ideal of having “one mind and one heart”—the multitude of small comforts and assurances that come from sharing a concept of God, of the good life, of beauty, of moral standards, and even of familiar foods, holidays, and leisure practices. But it is doubly painful for those who do not fit in, who might, in a more fractured society, have found a more agreeable mode of sociality.

George Zinn, left behind without family or church, sought a substitute in local politicians and activists. “We were the only social interaction he had with anybody,” Stokes said. It was a poor substitute. George showed up to everything, but no one ever really wanted to deal with him; he was awkward, pushy, talked a great deal about nothing at all, was sometimes dirty, and not entirely there mentally. One conservative organizer told me about a time George showed up unannounced to a car parade: “He went from car to car trying to get a ride. And no one wanted to take him, nobody, because they kind of knew how odd of a guy he was.”

He had unpleasant run-ins with the law: He’d been arrested a number of times for trespassing and other kinds of disruption, and had been jailed—once for repeatedly failing to buy tickets for Utah’s light rail train, and once for a prank call that was taken for a bomb threat.

“I personally always thought George was annoying, as did most politicians,” the state representative told me. “We’re nice to him still, right? But he’s kind of annoying. But he’s that annoying person that just wants to be involved, but they’re weird. . . . He’s there, so you’re not going to be rude to him, but you really don’t want to sit and just listen to him talk, because he just manages to get everywhere somehow. I don’t know how he’s able to do it.”

By 2025, George’s long life of isolation had taken its toll on him. He was in poor physical condition, suffering from chronic pain and walking with difficulty. His mental health had long been bad, but he resisted going to therapy, even when offered in court the chance to do so. And at some point, he had picked up the hideous, soul-cankering habit of viewing child pornography—something he later voluntarily disclosed to investigators.

“He was not well, and wondered why he was still on the Earth,” Stokes said. What abyssal depths his thoughts had plumbed by September 10, no one may ever know. But when Tyler Robinson, a fellow exile, stamped in blood his permanent alienation not just from the people of Utah but from human society at large, George saw his own opportunity—for attention, perhaps, or maybe for the quiet relief of the grave—and took it.

“I shot him, shoot me!”

Every tragedy is performed on the great stage of humanity; the agonists are not the only parties touched by the act of violence. Half an ounce of lead shattered a world—not only for Charlie Kirk, whose life it took, but for his wife, his children, his friends. With equal efficacy it shattered the life of the assassin, who may yet face, in the firing squad, the ultimate retort humanity can give to its oppressors. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.

The shot that killed Charlie Kirk must surely also have pierced the heart of the shooter’s father, Matthew Robinson, who suffered his own personal akedah—this time, with no prospect of divine reprieve. He recognized his son in the security footage put out by law enforcement searching for Kirk’s assassin. Surely there can be no more horrible task than for a parent to confront their child, the fruit of a thousand hours of love and patience and devotion, and find them worthy of the scaffold. He made the awful decision to put his son in the hands of justice.

But even as the tragedy unfolded, the very communal spirit—the spirit of Zion—that had failed George Zinn and Tyler Robinson began knitting up the wounds that the assassin had opened. Students, fleeing in shock from a gruesome murder that had taken place directly in front of their eyes, found refuge in the Orem and City Center temples. In street clothes and dirty shoes, they gathered together into the holiest places of the church to plead for peace and for divine assistance, and to worship the Son of God who had already trodden death underfoot.

Matthew Robinson, agonizing over the guilt and fate of his son later that day, found a different mercy. His son, he was convinced, had to face the law. But it must have seemed impossible to contact the police himself. Instead, he turned to the church. The call that led to Tyler Robinson’s arrest came from a friend in the congregation, who had been involved in law enforcement and knew the right things to say—leaving the father to grieve in peace.

Orem and Provo, quiet cities rocked by an entirely unanticipated tragedy, quickly coalesced around suffering students. Vigils commemorating the life and work of Charlie Kirk were organized overnight—testifying, to the haunting tune of “God Be With You Till We Meet Again,” that neither Charlie’s work nor his life had been ended, finally, by the assassin’s bullet. Memorials still multiply on the grounds of Utah Valley University: chalked passages of scripture and sketches of crosses cohabitating with American flags and red MAGA hats.
As for George Zinn and Tyler Robinson, they await the judgement of law and history, enshrouded in the darkness of the human soul that no vigil candle can burn away.