"She wasn't attending as a fan. She was there to protest him. She doesn't like it when "an influential person actively strives to take rights away from other people," as she put it. On the day of the event, she said, she and her friends weren't there to provoke Kirk, or to upstage him. "We just wanted him to see us," she said."
"He had. She also got the attention of Kirk's fans. "The entire crowd down there of like thousands of people started booing us and screaming at us. It was at that point that I was like, This is not safe," she said. It wasn't. As everyone knows by now, roughly 20 minutes into Kirk's event, there was a sound: one sharp pop. For a moment, no one moved. Then people screamed. "The immediate pandemonium that followed was hellish," Niyah recalled."
"First she crouched with other students behind the balcony railing, trying to understand what had just happened. "I thought I saw him go like this," she said, raising her hand to her neck. "But when I watched the close-up video, he was unconscious. He was so-and his hands didn't even go up," she said. "I was like, 'Oh no. Oh no, no, no.' " Below her, students screamed and pushed past one another. In the chaos, she noticed a man break from the crowd and race toward the balcony where she stood. He was furious. "I saw him leaning like he was about to go punch somebody," she said. Suddenly, he was in front of her. "I could feel his breath on my face," Niyah told me. "He was about to take a swing at me. And this angel of a woman got in between me and him, and I was like, 'Dude, you need to back off.' ""
Niyah remembers the shooting day in shards. She stood on a balcony at a Charlie Kirk event at Utah Valley University to protest him rather than to attend as a fan. She and her friends wanted only to be seen, not to provoke. Kirk's supporters below began booing and screaming, creating an unsafe atmosphere. About 20 minutes into the event, a sharp pop rang out and immediate pandemonium followed. Niyah crouched behind the railing, later seeing Kirk unconscious in close-up video. A furious man rushed toward her and nearly struck her before a woman intervened.
Read at Slate Magazine
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