Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., on Friday described the arrest of the man accused of killing the activist Charlie Kirk as “historic” — a fast-track triumph for law enforcement that proved the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s push to “let good cops be cops.”
The reality was more complicated.
While the federal government, led by the F.B.I., surged investigative manpower and technological firepower — high-tech drones, fingerprint experts, video analysts, evidence processing teams — the hunt for Mr. Kirk’s killer ended in the mundane way that many manhunts do. Someone called in a tip to local law enforcement and identified the suspect, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah man.
“A family member of Tyler Robinson reached out to a family friend who contacted the Washington County Sheriff’s Office with information that Robinson had confessed to them or implied that he had committed the incident,” Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah told reporters on Friday. “We got him.”
What did make the investigation historic was the intense level of federal involvement spurred by the political significance of the man who was killed, and the unfathomable impact of his killing in a divided country sliding from vitriol to violence. Mr. Kirk was close to President Trump, who broke the news of the arrest on Fox. Mr. Patel, a former podcaster, moved in the same conservative circles as Mr. Kirk and considered him a friend.
But it was not clear whether anything the F.B.I. did in the days after the shooting played a decisive role in shortening the search.
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The post How Law Enforcement Got the Man Suspected of Killing Charlie Kirk appeared first on New York Times.
