From Scholarship Winner to Wanted Man: The Path of the Kirk Shooting Suspect

In the conservative southern Utah city where Tyler Robinson grew up, neighbors and classmates described him as a reserved, intelligent young man raised in a Republican family who was deeply interested in video games, comic books and current events.

On Friday afternoon, people who knew Mr. Robinson struggled to reconcile their memories of him and his seemingly ordinary suburban upbringing with his notorious new image: the latest face of political violence, accused of fatally shooting the conservative influencer Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus earlier this week in what the authorities have called a political assassination.

“It’s really sad that someone with his mind put it to that sort of use,” said Keaton Brooksby, 22, a former high school classmate of Mr. Robinson’s.

Mr. Robinson had recently spoken with a family member about the fact that Mr. Kirk was going to hold an event in Utah, according to a police affidavit, and he and his relative discussed “why they didn’t like him and the viewpoints he had,” according to a police officer’s affidavit.

But as elements of the nation’s political left and right scrambled for motives, the image that has initially emerged of Mr. Robinson is not at all clear. Neither is his trajectory from a scholarship-winning high school student to an apprentice electrician to a suspect.

Mr. Brooksby said that Mr. Robinson was generally considered a quiet pupil when they were growing up in the conservative St. George area, but one day in high school, the topic of the 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, came up during lunch. Few there knew exactly what had happened, but Mr. Robinson was sure of himself.