'His Own Father Turned Him In': Howard Stern on the Pathetic, Tragic End to the Hunt for Charlie Kirk's Killer

This is Howard Stern, and I’ve got to tell you, I’m just completely gutted. We’ve spent the last few days talking about the horror of the Charlie Kirk assassination, about the state of this country, about the pain his family is going through. And now, they’ve caught the guy. You’d think there would be some sense of relief, some sense of justice. But honestly, the details of how it all went down just make this whole damn story more pathetic and more heartbreaking.

They’ve arrested a 22-year-old kid named Tyler Robinson. Look at his face. He’s just a kid. And this kid, apparently, is the one who climbed a roof and decided to end a man’s life because of his political opinions. But here’s the part that just twists your stomach into knots: they caught him because his own father saw his picture on the news and turned him in. Can you even imagine that? Can you comprehend the hell that father is living in right now? You raise a son, you love him, and one day you have to make a phone call to tell the authorities that your boy is a murderer. An assassin. It’s a nightmare that defies words.

So now you have two families completely destroyed. You have the Kirk family, a wife without a husband and two babies who will never know their dad. And you have the Robinson family, who have to live with the shame and the horror of what their son did. This isn’t a political victory for anyone. This is a profound American tragedy, a story of two families obliterated by a sickness that is consuming this country.

The timeline of what this kid did just makes me sick. This wasn’t some crime of passion. This was a coward’s plot. According to the cops, Robinson showed up on the Utah Valley University campus at 8:29 in the morning. Eight-thirty. He gets there, driving his Dodge Challenger, and spends the next few hours preparing. He changes his clothes, sneaks through stairwells, and gets himself onto a rooftop like he’s the star in some stupid, pathetic action movie. He had a high-powered rifle, an old Mauser they found later, wrapped in a towel in the woods. He got into his sniper’s nest and he waited.

Down below, Charlie Kirk is walking on stage. He’s in front of 3,000 people. He’s throwing hats into the crowd, he’s laughing, he’s getting ready to do his thing. And look, you all know me. I didn’t agree with Charlie Kirk on much of anything. We probably would have argued about everything. But he was standing there, in the open, ready to talk, ready to debate. And this coward, this 22-year-old kid, is hiding on a roof. That’s the whole story of what’s wrong with this country right there. One guy is talking, and the other guy is aiming a rifle.

The final, cruel irony is that Kirk was answering a question about mass shootings when the bullet hit him. It’s a detail so twisted it sounds like it’s from a bad script. He’s carried away by six guys to an SUV, and it’s all over. A life extinguished. A debate ended by a bullet.

Forget the damn gun for a minute. Everyone is going to scream about the gun, and that’s a debate we can have another day. But a gun doesn’t aim itself. An old rifle wrapped in a towel doesn’t just decide to kill someone. The real story here is how we created a society where a 22-year-old kid is so consumed by political hatred that he thinks the only solution is murder. Where does that come from? It comes from the non-stop, 24/7 rage machine. It comes from the politicians and the media figures who tell us that the other side isn’t just wrong, they’re evil. That they’re not opponents, they’re enemies. That they need to be destroyed.

Well, here it is. This is what that destruction looks like. It looks like a young man’s mugshot and a widow’s tears. It looks like a father having to turn in his own son. The weapon is just a tool. The hate is the disease, and we are all infected with it. We’re swimming in it. And if we don’t wake the hell up and realize where this is heading, this is only the beginning. This isn’t about right versus left. It’s about sanity versus madness. And right now, madness is winning.