Erika Kirk, the widow of the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, is sharing the final message she sent her husband before he was shot and killed.
“He got up and I could hear him eating something in the kitchen. He’d been waiting all summer to begin touring,” Erika, 36, told The New York Times in an interview published on Sunday, September 21, recalling the morning before her husband was fatally shot.
Because her husband left for Provo, Utah, so early in the morning, she did not get to kiss him goodbye. Instead, she says she simply texted her husband “I love you.” It was the final text she sent the conservative influencer before he was killed.
“I’m allowing myself to feel this so deeply, without medication, without alcohol,” Erika told the outlet of her husband’s death. “The Lord is giving me discernment.”
Charlie was speaking at Utah Valley University on September 10 when he was fatally shot in the neck. The podcaster was debating mass shootings and gun violence when the shot rang out from what authorities said was nearly 200 yards away. He was quickly rushed to a nearby hospital where he was later pronounced dead. He was 31.
After her husband’s personal assistant, Michael McCoy, called Erika and told her Charlie had been shot, she flew from their home state of Arizona to Utah. During the flight, she was told her husband had died.
“I’m looking at the clouds and the mountains,” she recalled of the moment she heard her husband did not make it. “It was such a gorgeous day, and I was thinking: This is exactly what he last saw.”
She was later greeted by a sheriff at the hospital, who told her she could see her husband’s remains before advising against it — according to the law enforcement officer, the fatal bullet had “ravaged” the podcaster’s neck.
“With all due respect,” Erika recalled telling the sheriff, “I want to see what they did to my husband.”
She went on to describe how her husband looked after he was pronounced dead.
“His eyes were semi-open,” she told the outlet. “And he had this knowing, Mona Lisa-like half-smile. Like he’d die happy. Like Jesus rescued him. The bullet came, he blinked, and he was in heaven.”
Two days after the fatal shooting, authorities apprehended a 22-year-old suspect, who turned himself in at the behest of his parents. Despite claims made by many prominent Republican politicians, including the president of the United States, authorities have found “no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups.”
“Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive,” a person familiar with the investigation told NBC News on Saturday, September 21.
“I’ve had so many people ask, ‘Do you feel anger toward this man? Like, do you want to seek the death penalty?’ I’ll be honest. I told our lawyer, I want the government to decide this,” Erika told The New York Times of the suspected shooter’s fate. “I do not want this man’s blood on my ledger. Because when I get to heaven, and Jesus is like: ‘Uh, eye for an eye? Is that how we do it?’ And that keeps me from being in heaven, from being with Charlie?”
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