Charlie Kirk’s family wants justice for his assassination at Utah Valley University.
Attorneys for the family are building a wrongful death case against the school that failed to protect him.
But one buried Utah statute could gut their case before a jury ever hears it.
A Rooftop, A Warning, And A Sniper’s Bullet
A Utah government immunity law could upend the Kirk family’s efforts to bring a wrongful death lawsuit against Utah Valley University over alleged security failures surrounding Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Attorneys for Kirk’s family filed a notice of intent to sue Sept. 9, one day before the anniversary of his death.
The filing alleges a series of security failures by the university, including declining additional police officers, failing to adequately address concerns from Kirk’s security team and not having an adequate security plan in place for his visit. And attorneys for the family did not stop there.
Attorneys for the family said Kirk’s death resulted from a string of “reckless decisions” by officials at Utah Valley University that left him exposed to a rooftop sniper, who fired a fatal shot from more than 400 feet away on Sept. 10, 2025. Kirk, 31, had been debating students in an outdoor courtyard surrounded by tall buildings and with several thousand people in attendance.
But the family’s case may hinge on one piece of paper. West Coast Trial Lawyers president Neama Rahmani suggested the Kirk family’s strongest evidence could be a message from UVU Police Chief Jeffrey Long acknowledging concerns about rooftop access to the Sorenson Center, a building located “pretty close” to where Kirk was scheduled to speak.
The Sorenson Center sits directly west of the Losee Center, where prosecutors say Tyler Robinson fired the shot that killed Kirk. And that proximity, combined with the police chief’s own written warning, is exactly the kind of paper trail plaintiffs’ lawyers dream about.
Rahmani laid out why that particular piece of evidence matters so much. “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 said of the Kirk family.
Utah’s Government Shield Could Swallow the Case Whole
But here’s where things get ugly for the Kirk family fast. Legal experts say the Kirks face an uphill legal battle because Utah law grants government entities — including their officers and employees — broad immunity from lawsuits arising from a lengthy list of circumstances, including the performance or failure to perform discretionary functions and claims involving assault, battery, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution and civil rights violations.
University of Utah law professor Teneille Brown did not sugarcoat the family’s odds. “Unfortunately, Charlie Kirk’s family is going to have a very difficult time prevailing in a wrongful death case in Utah,” Teneille Brown, a University of Utah law professor, told Fox News Digital.
Brown explained exactly why the state’s own recklessness might not matter in the eyes of the law. “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.”
Rahmani, for his part, walked through why cases like this one are so hard to win regardless of the facts on the ground. Neama Rahmani, president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told Fox News Digital that wrongful death claims against the government are already difficult for plaintiffs to win because government entities generally enjoy broad immunity from lawsuits stemming from assaults or batteries committed by third parties.
He has been through this fight before. “I’ve handled lack of security cases, including lack of security cases against the government,” Rahmani told Fox News Digital. “They are tough because you are trying to hold the police or city, county or state responsible for someone else’s criminal actions.”
But Rahmani did leave the family a narrow opening. “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.”
That distinction is everything here. And it’s why the Long message about rooftop access matters so much to the family’s legal team.
Brown said Utah law can shield government officials from lawsuits even when they fail to perform their job functions. That’s a staggering standard for a state university to hide behind after a man was gunned down on its own campus.
What Does This Mean For The Kirk Family And The Country?
Charlie Kirk’s assassination was not some random act of violence. Robinson allegedly targeted him for his political beliefs, and prosecutors have already made that plain in court filings.
Robinson also showed no visible reaction when the court referenced his alleged targeting of Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, for his political ideology. Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray said that Robinson is being charged with several counts, including aggravated murder. A judge has already granted Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, a pre-trial protective order.
Kirk’s assassination sits alongside a growing and disturbing list of left-wing political violence targeting American public figures. Multiple assassination attempts against President Trump and the plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh belong in that same conversation. Whenever critics try to claim right-wing violence is somehow equivalent, they are working overtime to distract from a documented pattern of ideologically driven attacks originating almost entirely on the political left.
But the legal fight ahead has nothing to do with Robinson’s motive. It has everything to do with whether a state university can hide behind a decades-old immunity statute after ignoring its own police chief’s written warning about rooftop access near an event with thousands of people packed into an open courtyard.
That should trouble anyone who believes public institutions ought to answer for gross negligence, regardless of what political label gets attached to the victim. And it should trouble Utah lawmakers specifically, since they are the ones who wrote a statute broad enough to cover even reckless conduct that leads to someone being shot on a public college campus.
Government immunity laws exist for a reason. Nobody wants every city, county or state getting sued into bankruptcy every time a crime happens on public property.
But there is a difference between ordinary negligence and a police chief flagging a specific, foreseeable danger in writing and the university failing to act on it anyway. If Utah’s courts read the immunity statute as broadly as legal experts fear, the Kirk family may never get a jury to even hear that argument.
That outcome would leave the public with an unsettling lesson: a university can be warned in writing about a specific security gap, do nothing about it, watch a man get shot dead as a direct result, and still walk away without ever facing a jury. Whatever happens with this filing, that is the reality Utah lawmakers will eventually have to answer for.
Sources: Fox News, CNN, Yahoo News
