Charlie Kirk's family says his killing on a Utah college campus was entirely preventable, but legal experts warn that a sweeping state immunity statute could shield the university from accountability even if the evidence proves reckless security failures.
Attorneys for the Kirk family filed a notice of intent to sue Utah Valley University on September 9, one day before the anniversary of Kirk's death, naming the school, UVU Police Chief Jeffrey Long, and former university president Astrid Tuminez. The filing lays out a pattern of alleged negligence: the university declined requests for additional police officers, ignored warnings about unsecured rooftop access near the event venue, and had no written security plan for an outdoor speaking engagement that drew roughly 3,000 people.
Kirk, the 31-year-old co-founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed on September 10, 2025, while speaking on the UVU campus in Orem, Utah. Prosecutors have identified 23-year-old Tyler Robinson as the gunman, saying he fired the fatal shot from the Losee Center, a building adjacent to the outdoor event site. Security footage obtained by investigators shows a suspect believed to be Robinson using a staircase to access a rooftop facing the area where Kirk was speaking just after noon that day.
Kirk left behind his wife, Erika, and two small children. The prospective plaintiffs in the case are Erika Kirk and the couple's two juvenile children.
The family's notice of claim paints a picture of a university that was warned and did nothing. According to the filing, Turning Point USA organizers explicitly told Chief Long that rooftops near the Sorenson Center, a building sitting directly west of the Losee Center and close to where Kirk was scheduled to speak, were accessible and posed a threat. Long's response, as described in the filing, was a text message: "I got you covered."
He did not cover it. The rooftop access was never secured.
Fox News Digital reported that only six campus police officers were assigned to the event, just 25 percent of UVU's police force, for an outdoor gathering with thousands of attendees. The filing further alleges that President Tuminez denied Chief Long's own request for more officers, and that no supplemental resources were sought from neighboring law enforcement agencies. Kirk was placed in an exposed outdoor venue surrounded by elevated positions, with no written plan to address the obvious risks.
Brett Parkinson, the Kirk family's attorney, put it bluntly in a public statement cited across multiple outlets:
"His murder was entirely preventable and, in fact, would not have happened had the State of Utah and UVU followed through on their stated security promises, which included protecting the rooftops surrounding the quad where Charlie was speaking."
The filing also drew a pointed comparison. The attempted assassination of President Trump by a rooftop shooter the previous year should have made the risk "especially top-of-mind," the Kirk family's legal document stated, given Kirk's close personal and political ties to Trump.
Even with that record, legal experts say the Kirk family faces a formidable obstacle that has nothing to do with the strength of their evidence. Utah's government immunity law grants state entities, including their officers and employees, broad protection from lawsuits arising out of a long list of circumstances, including assault, battery, false imprisonment, and civil rights violations. The law also covers the performance or failure to perform what the statute calls "discretionary functions," a category broad enough to potentially swallow security-planning decisions whole.
Tenielle Brown, a law professor at the University of Utah, told the New York Post that the statute is unusually sweeping, and that it has blocked families with strong cases before.
"Unfortunately, Charlie Kirk's family is going to have a very difficult time prevailing in a wrongful death case in Utah. And that's because Utah's government immunity statute is phrased in such a way that says even if the state and UVU were reckless, they retain immunity in cases that arise out of a battery, and that would include gunshot wounds."
Brown was not speculating. She pointed to a specific precedent. In 2010, a 19-year-old UVU student named Mika Scott was raped by Shawn Leonard, a prisoner with a violent criminal record who had escaped from a work-release program. Scott sued Utah County and the Utah County Sheriff's Office, arguing that officials had failed to screen inmates for violence and failed to police the boundaries of the work sites. Brown said Scott could have demonstrated carelessness and possibly recklessness, but the court ruled against her because the claim arose out of a battery, and the immunity statute barred it.
"There have been a number of cases where the plaintiffs and the family of the victims have sued for either wrongful death or battery. And in some cases, the government did behave recklessly, and they could show carelessness and recklessness and the plaintiffs were not able to prevail because it arose out of a battery. And that's unusual. Most states don't have that broad of a statute."
That is the core problem. Under Utah law as it stands, the question is not whether UVU was negligent. The question is whether the claim "arises out of a battery." A gunshot wound qualifies. And once it qualifies, the state walks.
Neama Rahmani, president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told Fox News Digital that the Kirk family's strongest argument may rest on Chief Long's text message. By telling Kirk's team "I got you covered," Rahmani argued, Long and UVU assumed a specific duty, one they then failed to carry out.
"That means they're gonna argue that they assume the responsibility to make sure Charlie Kirk was safe, and they failed to do so."
Rahmani acknowledged the difficulty of the case. He has handled lack-of-security lawsuits against government entities before and called them "tough" because the plaintiff is trying to hold the government responsible for someone else's criminal conduct. But he drew a distinction between a general duty to protect the public, which courts rarely enforce, and a specific, voluntarily assumed duty to protect a named individual at a specific event.
"In cases where you have the government taking on a duty, that tends to be better than simply arguing that the government has a duty to protect everyone because we know that murders happen all the time, and you can't sue the government just because someone is killed."
Whether that distinction can survive Utah's immunity statute is the question the Kirk family's lawyers will have to answer.
Brown noted that the Utah Supreme Court itself signaled discomfort with the breadth of the immunity law as far back as 2005. In Wagner v. Utah, the court held that civil battery does not require an intent to cause physical or psychological injury, a ruling that expanded the statute's reach even further. But in the same decision, the justices sent a message to the legislature.
"The court said, it may not be prudent for the state to continue to retain immunity here. And they're kind of signaling to the legislature that the legislature should probably change the statute to allow for suits in cases like Charlie Kirk's."
The legislature did not act. More than twenty years later, the statute remains unchanged. Brown said it "still says very clearly that you can't sue the state if the claim arises out of a battery."
She also raised a deeper accountability problem. The traditional justification for government immunity, that voters can hold negligent officials accountable at the ballot box, does not apply to university administrators or campus police chiefs. Nobody elected Astrid Tuminez. Nobody voted for Jeffrey Long.
"That doesn't work. That argument doesn't for the UVU president because nobody can vote them out of office, nobody is having any political check on the campus police."
Tuminez stepped down from her position in May 2026 after eight years as UVU president. The article does not specify whether her departure was connected to Kirk's death.
Utah Valley University's official statement was brief. A spokesperson said the university is "aware of the notice of claim" and that "UVU addresses legal matters consistent with our established processes." The statement added: "Our focus remains on supporting our campus community."
The Kirk family's notice of claim names the State of Utah, UVU, the UVU Police Department, Chief Long, and Tuminez. The Washington Examiner reported that the notice is the required first step under Utah law before a formal lawsuit can be filed against a government entity. Breitbart noted that the filing also cited the university's failure to monitor surveillance footage in real time as a contributing factor, another layer of alleged negligence on a day when cameras apparently captured Robinson walking to the rooftop before the shooting.
Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA in 2012, building it into one of the most prominent conservative youth organizations in the country, with a presence on high school and college campuses nationwide. He was 31 years old when he was killed.
The family has the evidence. The question is whether Utah's government has written itself a law broad enough to make evidence irrelevant, and whether the legislature will keep looking the other way.
