Roof security among student questions after Charlie Kirk murder

OREM — In the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk murder, students have raised several security questions surrounding Wednesday’s event including why access wasn’t more closely monitored, and why rooftops apparently weren’t the focus of more surveillance.

Related: Manhunt continues for shooter in Charlie Kirk’s killing

On Thursday, student Connor Snapp said he never expected to witness what he did from the front row.

“Being that close and watching what happened, I’ve yet to see a video that looked more gruesome than what I saw with my own eyes,” Snapp said during an interview with KSL 5.

Snapp said he was able to get to the front row with relative ease on Wednesday, which surprised him.

“I had a ticket to it so they could kind of count attendance, and I thought I was going to be scanned in, but when I got to campus I just walked straight down to the front fence like nobody had checked me in,” Snapp said.

He acknowledged that issue may have been moot, given that it appeared the shooter fired from a rooftop.

Snapp questioned, however, why the rooftops apparently didn’t receive more scrutiny ahead of and during the event.

He said he believed that area was known to be readily accessible by students.

“It’s a walkway that students can go up there and kind of just chill up there,” Snapp explained. “The railing does cut off, but the roof continues, so you can hop the railing and continue on the roof.”

Additional people familiar with the university acknowledged to KSL that was essentially the case with the roof areas.

As of Thursday afternoon, school officials delayed answering additional questions about the event’s security plan, citing an interest in hearing expected new information from federal investigators first.

On Wednesday, UVU Police Chief Jeff Long said his department had six officers on-site and some wearing plain clothes in the crowd.

“This is a police chief’s nightmare,” Long said Wednesday. “You try to get your bases covered, and, unfortunately, today, we didn’t.”

On Thursday, retired police chief Chris Burbank said it was easy to question the apparent lack of attention to the rooftops, but the answer wasn’t as simple as it appeared.

“When we talk about security, this individual is not a ‘protected’ individual,” Burbank said of Kirk. “This is no different than the CEO of a large corporation or a musician or an actor or anything else coming. They have some expectation for security, but it doesn’t necessarily bring with it the security sweep that a Secret Service sweep would have, so rooftops and those (areas) are always open.”

Burbank said protecting Kirk in open-air would likely have been problematic on its own, and he said the level of security was likely determined after a discussion between the conservative activist’s private security and the school.

“What we have to remember before we condemn anyone for the lack of security or a change in security—we need to think about maybe this was the level of security that was appropriate with the information that they had,” Burbank said.

Burbank said an open-air, question-and-answer session is exactly how free speech should happen in America, and he said the fact that Kirk was murdered doing that is “alarming.”

Snapp said he believed the security questions were valid and should be asked.

“I just don’t think you can be too cautious about any situation in life,” Snapp said. “With how things are nowadays, I don’t think it’s wrong to overanalyze certain situations going into them because you just never know.”