Authorities Thursday released two images of a person they are seeking as they investigate the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, indicating that they had not been able to identify him through facial recognition or other technology and needed the public’s help.

The grainy images show a man in a stairwell wearing a black shirt, a baseball cap and dark sunglasses. Authorities have described him as a person of interest. State and federal officials also said they had found a bolt-action rifle used in the attack, as well as imprints of a forearm, a palm and a shoe.

Investigators were able to track the gunman’s movements as he climbed onto the roof of a campus building, said Beau Mason, Utah’s public safety chief, at a news conference. Mason added that officials would release the images of the person they were tracking only if they could not identify him through other means.

The weapon used to kill Kirk, a close ally of President Donald Trump, was a “high-powered bolt-action rifle” that investigators later found in a wooded area near the campus of Utah Valley University, where Kirk had been speaking to a large crowd Wednesday afternoon, said Robert Bohls, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Salt Lake City office.

Officials referred to the person they were hunting as a man throughout a news conference Thursday morning. Mason said the person being sought “blended in well” at the campus because he appeared “to be of college age.”

He arrived on campus shortly before noon and used a stairway to make his way to the roof of a campus building overlooking the site of Kirk’s scheduled appearance, according to Mason. After the shooting — a single shot that hit Kirk in the neck — the person jumped from the roof and fled to a nearby neighborhood.

Here’s what else to know:

— The weapon: The gun discovered near campus was an older-model Mauser 30-06 caliber high-powered bolt-action rifle, according to three federal law enforcement officials based on a preliminary internal assessment. The weapon and several recovered cartridges are being traced by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives analysts, but the evidence has not yet led to a person of interest, they said.

— Heightened fears: Kirk’s killing, the latest in a string of attacks targeting American political figures, intensified fears that political violence is becoming normalized in a highly polarized nation. On the floor of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, a request for a moment of silence for Kirk devolved into bitter partisanship.

— Trump casts blame: Trump blamed the rhetoric of the “radical left” for Kirk’s killing, but investigators in Utah did not assign any possible motive to the gunman. Kirk promoted beliefs including that the benefits of gun rights outweighed the lives lost to gun violence, and that nonwhite immigrants would soon displace white Americans.

— Commentator fired: MSNBC has fired Matthew Dowd, a political analyst who said on-air that Kirk had pushed hate speech, adding that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” Dowd later apologized on social media.

— Pressure on Patel: Kash Patel, the FBI director, congratulated officials for taking into custody “the subject for the horrific shooting” on Wednesday. He was forced to backtrack on social media after the person was cleared and released. The reversal was a source of significant embarrassment for the FBI director on a day when three former agents filed a lawsuit portraying him as a partisan neophyte.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Jacey Fortin, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Devlin Barrett
c. 2025 The New York Times Company