Charlie Kirk’s spiritual mentor has recounted the shocking moments after the right wing commentator was shot and how he was rushed to the hospital in a car that still had a door swinging open.
Frank Turek, a Christian author, was just yards away talking to his daughter on FaceTime when the fatal shot was fired, causing Kirk to fall backwards off his chair, bleeding heavily from his neck.
“The first words out of my mouth [were] ‘No, no, no, no, no!’” he said speaking on a podcast on the Cross Network in an episode called The Greatness of Charlie Kirk: An Eyewitness Account of His Life and Martyrdom.
Turek recalled how he had rushed round to the back of the staging area where Kirk was being carried out by his security team through the chaos, and ran with them to a waiting car.
“If your son got hit, what would you do?” he said. “I got in the car because if there was any way I could save him, I had to do something. I couldn't just say ‘ok take him. You guys got it.’”
Kirk first reached out to Turek years ago for mentorship in Christian apologetics – the concept of explaining Christianity using discourse and arguments – Turek said in the podcast, and their relationship had grown much stronger over the years.
There were five people in the car, including Turek, that accompanied Kirk to hospital.
“Charlie's laid out in front, just right in front of me, and Charlie is so tall, we can't close the door,” he said. “We drove four miles… four something miles all the way to the hospital with the door open.”
He added that the entire time they had been trying to stop Kirk bleeding, performing CPR in the back of the vehicle, and had cut through intersections in the rush to get him medical attention. But it was too late.
“Charlie wasn't there. His eyes were fixed. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking past me, right into eternity,” Turek recalled. “He was with Jesus already.”
Turek added that he had been told later that Kirk had been “killed instantly, and felt absolutely no pain.”
“But of course, we had to try,” he said. “And by the way, there was just nothing, nothing any of us could do about it. We were giving him CPR, but nothing was happening.
“It wasn't like if we had better first aid, or we had better medical facilities, or we were faster to the hospital we could have saved him. We couldn't. So if that's any comfort at all, Charlie didn't suffer. He was gone.”
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