It wasn't until she saw the size of the crowd gathering at Utah Valley University that senior Hazel Kynaston understood the significance of who Charlie Kirk was.
"We just used our lunch break that we had in between two classes to go down and kind of see this event," she said.
She admitted she had never heard of him, he simply didn't cross her algorithm. But campus police estimate about 6,000 students had gathered on Sept. 10, 2025, to hear the conservative activist field questions from students in the open Q&A forum he had become famous for. Kynaston realised his presence was a big deal, and fought through the "pretty intense" crowd with her friend to get near the front.
She had been in her spot for only a few moments when she watched Kirk's body seize up and collapse off his stool. Authorities say a single shot from a high powered hunting rifle about 150 yards away struck Kirk.
"I didn't know a person could bleed like that," she said. Her voice shook as she described the stunned silence that lingered for a second before chaos and panic ensued.
Kynaston, along with hundreds of other students who witnessed Kirk's death, are seeking help from the state to pay for mental health and trauma support.
"It was a moment that I can never get back," she said. "You know, like what I witnessed and like the fear and the adrenaline and the inexplicable feeling of I'm next."
Utah Office for Victims of Crime Director Chyleen Richey said in the days following the shooting, at least 500 witnesses approached her office seeking compensation for things like mental health counseling. So far, 173 have actually applied for those benefits.
"What we have to determine is a zone of danger for our benefits," she explained.
In other words, someone at the front of the crowd who saw everything that day might be entitled to different benefits than someone who was further back with an obstructed view. In this case, after working with the FBI, the office determined the zone of danger to be the rows closest to Kirk when he was shot.
Beyond event attendees, Kirk's death was unique in that it happened on camera, with hundreds of angles of the shooting appearing on social media and television minutes later. While her office does not minimize other experiences, Richey said there are "certain qualifications for eligibility to have benefits paid for."
Richey said victims going through the Utah Office for Victims of Crime will receive up to 25 mental health sessions. It's unclear exactly how much this has cost the state, but in fiscal year 2025, they received $24.4 million in federal and state funding and paid almost $7million to victims of crime in Utah.
Trauma therapy
Kynaston wanted tools to manage debilitating flashbacks triggered by her environment. Since enrolling in the benefits, she's started eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a therapy that uses guided eye movements to process traumatic memories.
She said it's already helped.
"So being able to go through each one of those triggers and re-ground myself in a present moment, and being able to bring back that logical side of 'nothing is happening in this present moment'," she said.
Criminologist James Densley says numerous factors set the Kirk shooting apart from other similar events.
He is theis department chair of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Metro State University in Minnesota and deputy director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center.
Densley's research is extensive on public violence with multiple victims. What's different about the Kirk shooting, he says, is the global attention it received on mainstream media and social media platforms. Because of that publicity, victims are almost forced to constantly re-live the event. The political undertones of the crime are another.
"The people who were traumatized that day then have to watch strangers online fight about whether the death mattered or not, and that ordinary mourning that we would do doesn't work in those conditions," he said.
Hazel Kynaston said this is exactly what her experience was like. She described how every time she looked at her phone she would see people "having discourse of 'did he deserve it or not?'"
But the most triggering aspect for her was the fact that it happened on her campus.
"The most impactful part of it was the fact that I had to go back every day to school," she said. "I had to walk the same path every day that I had to walk when I was trying to get away, you know, and like leaving campus, you know, and all those memories that are associated with feeling completely exposed and unsafe."
Densley believes the shooting's mental health impact may take time to emerge, especially among a crowd that skewed conservative and male — groups less likely to say they're struggling.
He believes those seeking victim compensation may represent only a fraction of those affected.
"That number is not a measure of the extent of the harm," he said. "It's really just a measure of those who've been able to navigate the legal system to file a claim."
In the case against the man accused of shooting Kirk, Tyler Robinson, victimology is an emerging talking point. Prosecutors say they will seek the death penalty if he is convicted. On Aug. 12, the defense argued for the death penalty to be taken off the table because they claim the bullet "hit the intended target," and no one else was endangered.
That could prove to be a key issue in the case against Robinson. In the charges filed against him, prosecutors claim other people could have been harmed by his actions and cite that as an aggravating factor that makes Kirk's killing a capital crime.
Robinson has yet to enter a plea to the charges, which include aggravated murder and six other counts. A hearing to determine whether there is enough evidence to move the case to trial is set for Sept. 1.
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