Medical Examiner's Wonky Conduct in Tyler Robinson Trial

From the outset, the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner has been strangely unhelpful in clarifying the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Autopsy reports in Utah are not public record, but this shouldn’t prohibit the medical examiner from issuing a statement about the cause and manner of Charlie Kirk’s death and the characteristics of the bullet wound.

Instead of a clarifying statement from the medical examiner, we got the following weird statement from Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet on October 21, 2025.

“I want to address some of the discussion about the lack of an exit wound with Charlie,” Kolvet wrote in a post on X.

“The fact that there wasn’t an exit wound is probably another miracle, and I want people to know,” Kolvet continued, explaining that he had spoken with the surgeon who worked on Charlie in the hospital.

“He said the bullet ‘absolutely should have gone through, which is very very normal for a high powered, high velocity round. I’ve seen wounds from this caliber many times and they always just go through everything. This would have taken a moose or two down, an elk, etc,’” he recalled.

“But it didn’t go through. Charlie’s body stopped it,” he added.

When he mentioned to the doctor that there were “dozens of staff, students, and special guests standing directly behind Charlie” when he was shot, the doctor reportedly replied, “It was an absolute miracle that someone else didn’t get killed.”

“His bone was so healthy and the density was so so impressive that he’s like the man of steel,” Kolvet recalls the doctor saying.

This is not a credible statement, and it raises a number of concerns.

It strikes me as very perplexing that a “surgeon operated on Kirk,” because in the video of the shooting, Charlie reacted with a decorticate posture—that is, an abnormal body posture characterized by flexion of the upper limbs—caused by severe trauma to the central nervous system. This indicates that the bullet either directly struck his cervical spinal cord, or the shock wave of the supersonic bullet passing near his spinal cord traumatized it.

A 150-grain, .30-06 bullet’s energy at 150 yards from the muzzle varies by ammunition, but a common hunting cartridge has an estimated value of approximately 3,000 foot-pounds (with the bullet traveling at about 2500 feet per second). In other words, the .30 caliber (.30 inch diameter) metal projectile struck his neck with sufficient kinetic energy to move a 3,000 pound mass a linear distance of one foot.

According to the police and prosector, the shot was fired from the roof of the Losee student center, which is about 80 feet above and 426 feet away from Charlie’s position on stage. If this was indeed the case, the bullet struck Charlie in the neck at a downward angle of about 10.65 degrees.

In video footage taken less than a second before he was shot, he is sitting upright.

The wound then appears on his neck slightly to the right (facing him) of the vertical midline of his throat.

If the angle of the shot was indeed 10.65 degrees from front to back, the bullet path would approximately resemble the following drawing.

If a the bullet that damaged Charlie’s cervical spinal cord was a .30-06 fired from 150 yards away, it seems very likely that it would have:

1). Severed his spinal cord, killing him instantly.

2). Passed through his neck.

And yet:

1). According to Andrew Kolvet, he spoke to a trauma surgeon “who worked on Charlie at the hospital.”

2). There was no exit wound.

Note that the cervical vertebrae are supported by strong muscles and have high compressive strength, but are far too delicate to stop a .30-06 bullet traveling at 2,500 feet per second.

If ALL of the kinetic energy of a 3,000 foot-pound projectile was absorbed by Charlie’s neck—as distinct from the bullet passing through the neck—it would have done spectacular trauma to his neck, as distinct from producing the clean hole visible in the video footage that apparently ruptured his carotid artery and jugular vein.

This makes me wonder if the fatal shot was fired from a pistol cartridge with a higher caliber bullet but much lower velocity and kinetic energy. It strikes me as far more likely that the cervical spine and neck muscles could stop a bullet from a handgun cartridge and absorb all its kinetic energy.

And so I have been waiting for word from the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner. I figured we would get it at Tyler Robinson’s trial, but the medical examiner in this case continues to act in a wonky way.

So far, we have been told that the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner produced an autopsy report on Charlie Kirk that was admitted as evidence (Exhibit 11) in Tyler Robinson’s July 2026 preliminary hearing.

However, the medical examiner did NOT testify, and still we have received no public disclosure of wound specifics. The full report remains non-public under Utah law and court restrictions.

The Utah State Bureau of Investigation Agent David Hull testified about the medical examiner’s report under rules allowing reliable hearsay at that stage. Hull stated that the report listed the manner of death as homicide and the immediate cause as a gunshot wound of the neck (correcting an initial misstatement of “murder”).

Why didn’t the medical examiner testify about his findings?

I find this very weird.

Defense counsel objected to the admission of this testimony without the examiner present and to publication of its contents; the judge admitted it but barred public display out of respect for the family’s privacy and the sensitive medical information.

The authorities have stated that bullet fragments (one jacket fragment and multiple lead fragments) were recovered from Kirk’s body during the autopsy and later examined by the ATF, and that tool mark comparison to the recovered rifle was inconclusive due to damage/deformation.

No detailed public testimony from the pathologist has described the precise internal wound track, exact direction of the shot beyond the overall circumstances of a rooftop shot to the neck, or a pinpoint location of every fragment.

Secondary accounts (including from security personnel who treated Kirk and hospital staff) have circulated claims of no visible exit wound, fragmentation upon striking cervical vertebrae, and recovery of material in the neck area. However, these are not the official, publicly released ME findings.

The complete ME’s report is confidential under Utah statute (limited to authorized parties such as next of kin, law enforcement, and counsel) and was not published in open court. In the preliminary hearing, presentation of the medical evidence was second-hand.

And so, I await full cross-examination of the medical examiner.

The murder of Charlie Kirk is yet another example of state authorities failing to clarify things, which necessarily results in confusion and speculation.

I am very familiar with this state of affairs, as I have written two works of true crime (Cold a Long Time and The Meaning of Malice) in which I performed the forensic investigations (with the assistance of independent forensic experts) that the medical examiners failed to conduct.

In both books, I showed how the acting medical examiners either deliberately concealed the true cause of death, or they overlooked key pieces of evidence that could have solved the crimes.

I presented the forensic evidence for Cold a Long Time on my website (Duncan MacPherson’s Death: Forensics) and I made a short documentary film about my forensic investigation for The Meaning of Malice (see below). Both are case studies of why we should NOT put blind faith in medical examiners, who are not only fallible, but also often subjected to political pressure and financial temptation.

As we have seen in our current era of COVID-19 vaccine injuries, almost the entire medical examiner profession has turned a blind eye to deaths caused by the vaccine.

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