Nineteen minutes passed between the moment a bullet struck conservative activist Charlie Kirk during his appearance on Utah Valley University’s campus Wednesday and when the school warned its students and staff that there had been a shooting.
The school sent a dozen messages over the next five hours.
The first seemed to indicate the shooter had been immediately captured, so some recipients thought it was safe to remain on campus. Others that followed gave conflicting guidance, if they included directions at all. And none of those messages clarified that the shooter, in fact, was still at large.
UVU’s campus remained an active scene for hours after the gunshot rang out. A suspected shooter was not arrested until the next night.
In the 19 minutes after the 12:23 p.m. assassination, a half dozen students burst into the classroom in the Keller Business Building on the south side of the Orem campus, where senior Ashley Ray was listening to a lecture. “I heard the word ‘shooting’,” she said.
“I turned around, and everyone goes silent. We’re like, ‘What’s going on?’” Ray told The Salt Lake Tribune. The students said there had been a shooting at the university, and multiple shots had been fired — actually, just one had been fired, Ray correctly noted in a Thursday phone call.
At what she estimated was 12:30 p.m., multiple rumors were already circulating on campus and online in the absence of a notification and guidance from UVU.
Unsure whether there had really been a shooting, the instructor suggested they continue with class. Ray decided to call her cousin, who is also a student there.
“‘Ashley, I saw it all happen,’” Ray said her cousin, sobbing, told her. “That’s when I was like, ‘Guys, this is actually happening.’”
Across campus, a seven-year UVU lecturer sat in a private meeting with a student in her office in the Clarke Building at the time. Her husband never calls her while she’s working, so when he called at 12:29 p.m., “I knew it was a big deal,” she said, and the instructor interrupted the discussion to answer.
The Tribune agreed not to name the faculty member because she fears retaliation for speaking out. A Tribune reporter confirmed her identity in a video call — the lecturer showed her university ID, and her name is listed in a current course catalog.
“One of his contractors had just happened to be on [social media] and saw that there was just a shooting on campus. I had no idea,” the faculty member said. “And he was like, ‘Are you OK?’ And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
She stepped into the hallway and saw colleagues also emerging from their offices after hearing from concerned family members and friends. One, she said, found out about the shooting through a text message from their cousin in Indiana.
“I felt like we were the last people to know what was going on,” she recalled.
With their only source being social media, where disinformative posts told faculty members that multiple people had been shot and a person claimed their daughter was killed, the professors grabbed the students they could and decided to “stick together in one place.”
Then, the first message from UVU came via text and email.
12:42 p.m. A single shot was fired on campus toward a visiting speaker. Police are investigating now, suspect in custody.
UVU Vice President of Administration and Strategic Relations Val Peterson, who is also a Republican state lawmaker, explained the delayed communication to reporters Thursday by pointing to the school’s responsibility to check the veracity of events in an emergency situation.
“In today’s world of social media,” Peterson said, attendees immediately started posting and texting about the shooting. “We have to get that information, we have to assemble that information, we have to verify that information.”
He continued, “And then, even after all of that, through all the chaos, that information was changing every second. And so we tried to put out the most accurate information that we could. We will review our communications protocols to see if there’s a way for us to speed up that information that goes out. But at the same time, we’ve also got to make sure that we’re current with what the current situation is.”
But the information sent to students and faculty wasn’t accurate. Although police had apprehended one man, he was not the suspected shooter. The message led some recipients to think the campus was safe, even though the actual shooter was at large.
The notification did not offer guidance as to what people on campus should do — were they supposed to continue on with their day? Should they evacuate? Or was it safest to shelter in place?
At around the same time the first message went out, a university staffer standing in a walkway near the entrance to the school’s bookstore told a Tribune reporter who was on site covering Kirk’s event that the school was evacuating the lower part of its campus, and that all classes had been canceled for the day.
[MORE: Interactive timeline of the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University]
When Ray’s professor saw the first message, she reportedly told her students that she thought it was safe for them to leave the classroom, and that it was best that they return home. Ray said she was one of the first students to leave the room.
As she walked toward a stairwell and called her husband, Ray said a man in tactical gear appeared, pointing a rifle in her direction and shouting, “Get in the classroom!”
“At this time, in my mind, I thought that the suspect was detained,” Ray said. She was swept into an office of a UVU employee she didn’t know.
Ray looked down at her phone and realized that, amid the scuffle, she had unintentionally hung up on her husband. He had texted her, “Please tell me you’re OK.”
And with no guidance from university officials, the lecturer huddled with her colleagues in the Clarke Building. She had a class scheduled for 1 p.m., so at 12:50 p.m., she emailed her students to tell them that they would not meet that day, and urged them to shelter in place or leave campus if they felt it was safe to do so.
“We hadn’t been given direction that classes were supposed to be canceled,” the instructor said. “I just felt like it was unethical to ask them to walk across campus to my class.”
1:12 Campus closed until further notice. Ongoing police investigation. If you are still on campus follow police direction.
Multiple individuals who spoke to The Tribune and were still on campus when the second message arrived said the communication further confused them — they didn’t know whether “follow police direction” meant they were supposed to find a police officer for guidance, or remain where they were and wait for a police officer to find them.
Seeing through a window that some people were leaving the Keller Business Buildings, Ray and a group of others inside the building did the same.
Eight minutes after the second message, a third told employees and students still on campus to evacuate. Then, 16 minutes later, they were told to shelter in place.
1:20 Campus closed, classes canceled until further notice. Police are investigating. Leave campus immediately.
1:36 Campus closed. Classes cancelled. Those on campus, secure in place until police officers can escort you safely off campus.
By the time she received the 1:20 p.m. text, Ray had already arrived at her car, which crept through a parking lot traffic jam toward her cousin’s dormitory. At that point in the afternoon, she still thought the suspected shooter had been apprehended. “We’re OK,” she thought, as she said hundreds of cars idled around her, waiting to leave campus.
An hour-and-a-half after a shot had been fired on campus, the most alarming message yet hit inboxes.
1:53 Shooter in [INSERT location], avoid area. If shooter is near. Run-Hide-Fight. More info to come.
1:53 DISREGARD THAT LAST MESSAGE.
Ray, along with other students, received those texts as she was walking up the stairs to her cousin’s apartment. “We really don’t know what’s happening,” Ray remembered.
When her cousin’s roommates arrived home shortly after, the women said a police officer told them they needed to get and stay inside because “they have the wrong suspect,” Ray said.
The lecturer sheltering in the Clarke Building said one of her coworkers saw only the second in the pair of messages and thought they were supposed to disregard the previous instruction to “secure in place.”
“So even then, once we started getting alerts, the system was so poor and communication was so mixed,” the instructor said.
Shortly after 2 p.m., Orem firefighter Brandon Byers, who was outside the Keller Business Building assisting in the sprawling emergency response, confirmed to a Tribune reporter that law enforcement had not located a suspected shooter.
“That would actually be very useful if that got out to the public, because I feel like we still have 10,000 students still on campus that think that [the shooter has] been apprehended and are just kind of hanging out,” he said.
2:31 Police are currently going to each building to escort people off campus. Roads to campus are currently closed.
When officers finally arrived on the floor where the UVU lecturer had been tucked away, they were clutching “massive” rifles and told the group of faculty members and students, “OK, you’ve got to get out of here,” she said.
The professors had seen the lines of cars that had delayed Ray’s effort to leave campus through the Clarke Building’s windows.
“We’re like, ‘To go where? To go sit in a parking lot like ducks?’” she said.
2:54 If on campus, call 801-863-8130. Police will come and escort you out of the building. Public transportation available at Orem Station by ped. bridge.
3:31 If you have items in your office you need to retrieve before leaving campus, call 801-863-8130.
Ray said that’s when, after seeing other people walking around outside her cousin’s dorm room, she decided to drive the two minutes to her own home near campus.
4:47 We are shocked by the tragic events today. This is an ongoing investigation.
5:09 Attention anyone still on campus in their vehicles can now exit including the parking garage. Proceed to the north.
5:47 UVU campus is ALL CLEAR. There is no ongoing threat to campus. This will be the last of the emergency text messages, check with www.uvu.info for more
As the sun set Wednesday night, some students lingered on campus. Clusters of people had flocked to campus to gawk, and an impromptu shrine had begun growing in front of a Utah Valley University sign on the south side of campus. The shooter’s family “helped to deliver him into the custody of law enforcement” late the next night, Gov. Spencer Cox said Friday.
“I don’t think a single text message was correct until the ‘all clear’ message,” Ray said over the phone Thursday. “I told my husband this morning, I don’t know how I’m going to go back to campus. If it was an active shooter who was shooting multiple people, running around the school, we would not have known until he was near us.”
Ray is studying event management, and said with the knowledge she has gained at the school, she sees numerous areas where UVU fell short. “This absolutely could have been prevented,” Ray said.
Several faculty members contacted The Tribune to say they have not been trained on how to react in an active shooter situation.
In a video posted Friday afternoon, UVU President Astrid Tuminez said, “The safety of our students, staff, faculty and visitors is our highest priority.” She did not mention the university’s initial response to the shooting Wednesday.
“Local, state and federal law enforcement are working with us to ensure a safe return to campus,” she continued. “ … I look forward to welcoming you back with open arms to Utah Valley University.”