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Home – Political Violence News – ‘YOU COULD HEAR THE SOBS OF A WIDOW’: Inside Charlie Kirk’s Murder Trial

‘YOU COULD HEAR THE SOBS OF A WIDOW’: Inside Charlie Kirk’s Murder Trial

The following is an excerpt of Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with Ryan Helfenbein, a friend of Charlie Kirk who attended the preliminary hearings in the case against the accused assassin Tyler Robinson, for the “Signal Sitdown,” which premieres on the Daily Signal’s YouTube page at 6:30 a.m. EDT on July 16.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Bradley Devlin: Before we jump into the emotion of that day, the courtroom, the video evidence, the DNA, the controversy, tell us a little bit about your relationship with Charlie Kirk and Trinity Road. 

Ryan Helfenbein: Yeah. So I met Charlie Kirk in 2019. I’ve been at Liberty University for seven years and at the beginning we were working professionally with one another. 

He was the co-founder of the Standing for Freedom Center, which I’m the founding executive director of. I met him back then when he was about 24, almost 25 years old and got to know him over a period of several years. And Charlie has many friends. 

He was a stranger to almost no one. There are probably 1,000 people I could point to that on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that he was texting, that he was engaged in conversation, sharing Bible verses with. I was one of those guys. And we stopped working together in 2021 closely, but we remained friends. 

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We were at conferences together. He would appear on our podcast from time to time. And then, of course, every year I was involved in at least one, if not two, Turning Point events. And I’ve known him for a long time.

Erika Frantzve, that’s Erika Kirk’s maiden name. Erika I met in 2019 as well, and she was dating, wasn’t yet engaged to Charlie, but got to know her really well going all the way back then. 

And, in a way, a friend of the family having known them before they got married and then after they got married had interactions with them, for the past several years. And I’ll add this thing. I was with Charlie on September the 5th. 

That was the last time I saw him. I was in South Korea. We were both speaking at the same conference together. On September the 10th, when I was in a group text with many pastors and Charlie was in that group thread. I think the last thing I saw from him in that group thread was around September the 10th or September the 9th, something like that, September the 8th. 

But just asking for prayer, “Hey, I’m going to be on the road. I’m going to be going to these campuses. Hey, pray for me. Pray for my safety.” Of course, when somebody had, in that thread said shot had been fired at Utah Valley, I immediately had texted Erika Kirk and said, “I don’t know what’s happened, but sister, I’m praying for you, praying for God’s protection over you and over Charlie—just want you to know that.”  

And her response was, “I don’t know whether my husband is alive or dead right now.” And that was just a haunting thought. And so, I’ve walked through some of this with them. No one can know. It’s unimaginable to think what she had experienced. And I think there are people out there that do not have the best interests of everyone at heart. 

They’re malicious and they’re in it for themselves, rather narcissistic. And they’ve been peddling a lot of dangerous and reckless ideas that have no grounding or basis in reality or truth. So we can talk about some of those things. 

But I was invited by Erika just to come sit........

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