Planning at Utah Valley University was inadequate, not up to industry standards, and wholly unacceptable for an event with a high-profile speaker who had, on multiple occasions, acknowledged threats against his life.
By Amy LePore 01/29/2026
www.AmericanThinker.com
Many theories exist about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Some are serious inquiries into the unanswered questions surrounding the lone gunman narrative advanced by Utah authorities and the FBI. Others are more sensational, and while I suspect the real story is more mundane, I don’t discount them entirely. Either way, the public has every right to doubt an official narrative that is missing basic documentation, and to follow the facts wherever they lead.
I cannot claim to know whether Tyler Robinson acted alone. My concerns precede Robinson’s alleged actions on Sept. 10, 2025, focusing instead on the event’s pre-incident planning. Sufficient evidence exists to believe that the security team planned poorly; in fact, they’ve been quite public about it. Brian Harpole, the lead security manager for Integrity Security Solutions — the firm hired by Turning Point USA — gave a public account of the security posture that raised more questions than it answered and laid bare the most damning detail: that there was no plan to secure the rooftops.
It remains unclear whether investigators will fully account for these lapses in security planning, but what has surfaced points to pre-incident planning that was inadequate, not up to industry standards, and wholly unacceptable for an event with a high-profile speaker who had, on multiple occasions, acknowledged threats against his life.
Pre-incident planning is not optional for a security team; it is the most critical part of the job. An initial step in that planning process is often completing a venue’s event request documentation. This isn’t outside the norm, and the plans themselves are very basic. Yet somehow, amidst UVU and TPUSA’s errors, the event request for Sept. 10, 2025 lacked both a request for police presence and the requirement to have EMS on standby.
These omissions alone should shake the public’s faith in TPUSA’s security and call into question Harpole’s competence. While TPUSA will likely dismiss these errors as the fault of the UVU TPUSA Chapter students who completed the forms, it is an obvious gap in their event and security planning that college students are making these decisions.
It stands to reason that these early planning errors led to downstream chaos. Perhaps it delayed coordination between TPUSA security and UVU police; it’s reasonable to surmise that late planning caused the informality and callousness with which they would ultimately treat the need to secure the roof. In the absence of an incident action plan, a staffing roster, or a communications plan, however, it is impossible to know precisely what was planned for that day, or who owned which responsibilities. At this time, UVU is declining to release these documents, citing state law.
Yet we can draw a few conclusions from UVU emergency management documentation. The university’s Emergency Operations Plan, including its active shooter annex, assigns broad responsibilities like perimeter management, crime scene control, and staging evacuees, but it does not get into the kind of physical security specifics that matter at a real event, like how elevated access points are controlled, who owns roof access, and what verification is required. Those details should exist in the event’s operational plan, or an incident action plan, and that is exactly what the public has not been allowed to see.
The active shooter annex does include “manage the perimeter” under university law enforcement responsibilities. Because Kirk was a high-profile figure, that annex should have been part of the joint planning baseline with Harpole’s organization — at minimum as the default framework for how UVU defines access control and security boundaries when violence is a known possibility.
In other words, regardless of how they planned, whether UVU was the lead for elevated areas and perimeter control, or whether Harpole’s organization was intended to lead and UVU was supposed to support, a competent plan would have clearly assigned rooftop and perimeter control and then verified it. If that did not happen, or if it happened only informally and without verification, then we are left with exactly what we have now: a rooftop shooting at a planned event and no clear public explanation for how the most obvious vulnerability was handled.
By Harpole’s own account, we have reason to believe that at least some of these critical positions were assigned informally. By his description, he raised the rooftop issue directly, flagged it as a vulnerability, and then relied on an informal message from UVU leadership that basically amounted to, “gotcha.” By no industry standard is this level of informality acceptable.
If the only reassurance was informal, then it probably means rooftop control was never written into an incident action plan, never turned into a staffing assignment, and never verified through post orders, door checks, or a documented patrol. If Harpole’s team also did not have UVU-assisted roof access, keys, or formal authorization to secure elevated areas themselves, then UVU became the gatekeeper for the very access point that mattered most. That is why this is still worthy of investigation: because the public still cannot see the written assignments or the operational receipts that would show who was responsible for the roof, what was supposed to happen, and what actually occurred.
A deadly combination of pre-incident planning errors, lack of adherence to UVU’s law enforcement procedures, and last-minute informal security agreements seems almost impossible in today’s threat environment when considering protection for leaders like Kirk. Perhaps Harpole and his team had been lucky in past events and their lack of security prowess went unnoticed. Today, though, it’s evident for the world to see and made more alarming by a lack of transparency on one hand and admission of bumbling incompetence by Harpole on the other.
There is no shortage of theories about the untimely death of Charlie Kirk. Demanding a full accounting of formalized security plans and behind the scenes or informal agreements is important not only because the world wants to know why Kirk was left vulnerable, but because the chain of failures which could be easily chalked up to ineptitude may, in the light of day, hold some deeper truth which is key to understanding why the leader of the conservative movement in America is no longer with us.