Charlie Kirk's family has filed a notice of intent to sue Utah Valley University over the conservative leader's assassination, but legal experts say Utah's unusually broad government immunity statute could block the wrongful death claim before it ever reaches a jury.
Attorneys for the Kirk family filed the notice on Sept. 9, one day before the first anniversary of Kirk's death, naming UVU, campus Police Chief Jeffrey Long, and former university President Astrid Tuminez as targets of the planned lawsuit. The filing alleges a chain of security failures: the university declined requests for additional police officers, ignored warnings from Kirk's own security team about rooftop access near the speaking venue, and had no adequate security plan in place for an outdoor event that drew roughly 3,000 attendees.
Kirk, 31, co-founded Turning Point USA in 2012 and built it into a major force on high school and college campuses nationwide. He was shot and killed on Sept. 10, 2025, while speaking at UVU's campus in Orem, Utah. Prosecutors say Tyler Robinson fired the fatal shot from the Losee Center, a building on the university grounds. Kirk left behind his wife, Erika, and two small children.
The family's legal team contends UVU assumed a specific duty to protect Kirk, and failed. But two legal experts who spoke to Fox News Digital say the family's strongest evidence may not be enough to overcome a state law that shields government entities from liability even in cases involving clear recklessness.
The notice of claim paints a picture of a university that treated a high-profile, politically charged event with minimal preparation. Only six campus police officers were assigned to the event, representing just 25 percent of UVU's police force, and a request for more officers was allegedly denied by then-President Tuminez. There was no written security plan and no pre-event security briefing, Fox News Digital reported.
Turning Point USA organizers had specifically warned Chief Long about rooftop access to the Sorenson Center, a building located directly west of the Losee Center and close to where Kirk was scheduled to speak. Long's response, according to the filing: "I got you covered."
He did not. Surveillance footage allegedly showed Robinson on the roof of the Losee Center before the shooting, but the footage was not monitored in real time. After Kirk was shot in the neck, no ambulance was on site. He was transported to the hospital in a private vehicle.
The Kirk family's legal filing draws an explicit parallel to the attempted assassination of President Trump by a rooftop shooter the previous year, an event that, the family argues, should have made the rooftop vulnerability impossible to ignore.
Brett Parkinson, counsel for the Kirk family, put it bluntly in a statement included in the filing:
"His murder was entirely preventable and, in fact, would not have happened had the State of Utah and UVU followed through on their stated security promises, which included protecting the rooftops surrounding the quad where Charlie was speaking."
Despite the weight of those allegations, legal experts say the Kirk family faces a barrier that has nothing to do with the strength of their evidence and everything to do with the breadth of Utah law.
Tenielle Brown, a law professor at the University of Utah, told Fox News Digital that the state's government immunity statute is unusually sweeping. It grants government entities, including their officers and employees, broad protection from lawsuits arising from a long list of circumstances, including assault, battery, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, and civil rights violations. The statute also covers the performance or failure to perform discretionary functions.
Brown explained what that means for the Kirk family:
"Unfortunately, Charlie Kirk's family is going to have a very difficult time prevailing in a wrongful death case in Utah. And that's because Utah's government immunity statute is phrased in such a way that says even if the state and UVU were reckless, they retain immunity in cases that arise out of a battery, and that would include gunshot wounds."
That is the core problem. The Kirk family can allege negligence, recklessness, and broken promises, and the statute may still bar recovery because the underlying harm arose from a battery: a gunshot.
Brown described the statute as unusually broad compared to other states. Most jurisdictions do not extend government immunity so far that it covers cases where the government's own recklessness contributed to the harm.
Brown pointed to a case that illustrates the statute's reach. In 2010, Mika Scott, a 19-year-old UVU student, was raped by Shawn Leonard, a prisoner with a violent criminal record who had escaped from a work-release program. Scott sued Utah County and the Utah County Sheriff's Office, arguing that officials failed to screen inmates properly and failed to police the boundaries of the work site.
Brown said Scott could have shown carelessness and possibly recklessness, but because the claim arose out of a battery, the government immunity statute blocked her case. Brown told Fox News Digital:
"They were supposed to screen inmates to make sure that they weren't violent. And then when they went out in the community on the job sites, they were supposed to make sure that they were policing the boundaries so that these inmates couldn't escape and in a really terrible situation."
Scott could not prevail. The statute did not ask whether the government had been careless. It asked whether the claim arose out of a battery. It did, and that was the end of it.
Meanwhile, the criminal case against Tyler Robinson continues to move through the courts, with his defense team contesting procedural issues ahead of trial.
The Utah Supreme Court itself signaled concern about the statute's breadth. In its 2005 ruling in Wagner v. Utah, the court held that civil battery does not require an intent to cause physical or psychological injury, a definition broad enough to sweep in cases where the government's failure enabled someone else's violence.
Brown said the court went further, essentially urging the legislature to act:
"The court said, it may not be prudent for the state to continue to retain immunity here. And they're kind of signaling to the legislature that the legislature should probably change the statute to allow for suits in cases like Charlie Kirk's."
The legislature never acted. Brown confirmed that the statute remains unchanged more than twenty years later: "It still says very clearly that you can't sue the state if the claim arises out of a battery."
Brown also identified a structural accountability gap. University presidents and campus police chiefs are not elected officials. Voters cannot remove them at the ballot box. The traditional justification for sovereign immunity, that the public can hold government actors accountable through elections, does not apply to the people who made the security decisions at UVU.
"The president of UVU, the campus police, those people are not elected, and so if you were to say sovereign immunity is all about letting people decide whether they're state actors or careless at the ballot box, then you vote them out of office. That doesn't work. That argument doesn't for the UVU president because nobody can vote them of office, nobody is having any political check on the campus police."
Tuminez stepped down from her position in May 2026 after eight years as president. She was not voted out. She left on her own timeline.
Neama Rahmani, president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told Fox News Digital that cases against the government for security failures are inherently difficult because they require holding officials responsible for another person's criminal act. But he identified a key distinction in the Kirk case.
Rahmani said the Kirk family's attorneys will likely argue that UVU did not merely have a general duty to keep the campus safe, it assumed a specific responsibility to protect Kirk. Chief Long's message to Kirk's security team, acknowledging the rooftop concern and pledging to address it, is central to that argument.
Rahmani explained the legal logic:
"That means they're gonna argue that they assume the responsibility to make sure Charlie Kirk was safe, and they failed to do so. In cases where you have the government taking on a duty, that tends to be better than simply arguing that the government has a duty to protect everyone because we know that murders happen all the time, and you can't sue the government just because someone is killed."
The family's filing also pursues a constitutional "state-created danger" claim, Just the News reported, arguing that UVU's decisions did not merely fail to prevent the danger but actively created it by placing Kirk in an exposed outdoor venue surrounded by elevated positions while refusing to secure those positions.
UVU's response to the filing was terse. A university spokesperson told Fox News Digital: "We are aware of the notice of claim. UVU addresses legal matters consistent with our established processes. Our focus remains on supporting our campus community."
The statement did not address any of the specific allegations, the declined officers, the unmonitored surveillance footage, the absent ambulance, or the police chief's unfulfilled promise.
Erika Kirk has spoken publicly about the devastation of losing her husband and raising their two children alone. The question now is whether the legal system will give the family any avenue to hold accountable the institution that promised to keep him safe.
Robinson's defense team has also argued against the death penalty in the criminal case, adding another layer to a legal process the Kirk family must watch unfold on two separate tracks.
A state that shields its own institutions from accountability, even when those institutions were warned, made promises, and failed, is a state that has decided the government's comfort matters more than a family's right to answers. Utah's legislature has had twenty years to fix that. So far, it hasn't bothered.
