The two stories emerged weeks apart, in different cities, under vastly different spotlights. One unfolded on a university campus in Utah, the other in a quiet Cincinnati neighbourhood. Both ended in gunfire, both left families searching for meaning, and both revealed gaps in the very systems meant to guarantee public safety. Seen together, they read less like coincidences than like reflections of a deeper malaise, a pattern of procedural blindness that too often benefits those who thrive in opacity.
Charlie Kirk’s killing during an outdoor speech at Utah Valley University sent shock waves across the American political spectrum. Federal investigators later confirmed that DNA found on a towel wrapped around a rifle matched a young man, Tyler Robinson, 22, who has since been charged with capital murder. Surveillance footage and ballistic analysis appear to close the evidentiary loop, yet the closure feels forced. How a firearm could be positioned on a rooftop overlooking a secured event, and why no advance sweep detected that risk, remain questions largely unanswered. The efficiency of the forensic narrative contrasts sharply with the negligence that made it possible.
Three weeks earlier, hundreds of kilometres east, the bodies of Eden Adugna, 22, her sister Feven, 20, and their friend Bemnet Deresse, 27, were discovered after a shooting in the Mount Washington area of Cincinnati. Police later identified Samuel Tyler Ericksen as the gunman, saying he died of a self-inflicted wound. The case, officially resolved within days, exposed a quieter but equally troubling failure. Deputies had visited Ericksen only weeks before on a welfare check; he admitted owning a firearm but kept it. He was not detained, no weapon was confiscated, and the report languished until it became evidence of what should have been prevented.
In both episodes, the immediate explanations came quickly — perhaps too quickly. In Utah, investigators spoke of political rage and personal instability. In Ohio, authorities ruled out hate crime motives within 48 hours, despite the victims’ Ethiopian origin and the shooter’s documented prior contact with one of them. The haste was telling. It reflected not so much confidence in the evidence as the institutional instinct to simplify complex events before public doubt could settle in.
The families sensed the dissonance first. Relatives of Bemnet Deresse told local reporters that they learned of the deaths late and that the police initially contacted the wrong next of kin. They questioned why victims were not transported to the nearest hospital and whether delays in response may have cost lives. In a television interview, a family member described the communication from authorities as “fragmented, inconsistent, almost indifferent.” In Utah, the questions concerned not notification but prevention — how security assessments for a nationally broadcast event could miss a line-of-sight threat, and why organisers outsourced much of the vetting to private contractors rather than university police.
If these were isolated lapses, they might merit procedural audits and internal reviews. But repetition suggests pattern. In both cases, authorities appear more invested in producing a narrative of competence than in exposing the mechanisms of failure. The Cincinnati police chief described the triple homicide as “contained,” a word that resolves administrative anxiety but not public concern. The FBI’s confident presentation of DNA evidence in the Kirk case similarly reframed an operational debacle into a tidy story of forensic triumph. Both institutions reached for control of the narrative before establishing control of the facts.
There is, too, the question of proportional visibility. The Kirk case dominated national headlines, driven by the victim’s prominence and the political climate. The Adugna-Deresse killings faded from the news cycle within days. Yet each demanded equal scrutiny: in one, the protection of a public figure; in the other, the protection of ordinary lives. The imbalance underscores a hierarchy of attention that shapes not only media coverage but investigative rigour itself. Where cameras linger, procedures tighten; where interest wanes, corners are quietly cut.
A subtler parallel lies in the treatment of evidence that complicates official storylines. In Utah, early reports mentioned the possibility of an accomplice or secondary observer near the rooftop; subsequent statements omitted the detail. In Cincinnati, neighbours recalled hearing multiple sequences of shots, suggesting more than one weapon, but those accounts disappeared from later police summaries. In both instances, contradictory testimonies were smoothed over in the name of coherence. The omissions may be procedural housekeeping — or the symptom of a bureaucratic reflex that fears uncertainty more than truth.
Such reflexes flourish in environments where accountability is diffuse. American law-enforcement systems are local by design: jurisdictional lines blur between campus police, city departments, sheriffs, and federal agents. Responsibility becomes shared, and therefore diluted. When outcomes are tragic, each agency can claim that another held the decisive authority. In Utah, campus officials defer to the FBI; in Ohio, local police cite state procedures. The result is a theatre of investigation without a director, where transparency is everyone’s duty and no one’s habit.
Beyond the bureaucratic mechanics lies a cultural issue. The United States has normalised a tempo of violence and response that privileges resolution over understanding. Cases are declared closed once a suspect is dead or in custody; the deeper questions of prevention, motive, and systemic failure drift into silence. The public learns to accept tragedy as an unavoidable by-product of freedom, and institutions learn that brevity of explanation is mistaken for strength. In that environment, genuine inquiry becomes a threat to stability.
The invisible hand, if it exists, is not a singular plot but a climate, a confluence of interests that gains from confusion. When protocols are ignored, when evidence is summarised instead of scrutinised, when some deaths receive megaphones and others murmurs, the beneficiaries are not always those pulling triggers but those who profit from a world in which causes remain conveniently obscure. Every unasked question preserves that opacity.
To break such cycles, accountability must begin where narratives end: in the slow reconstruction of what really happened after the cameras depart. For the Adugna and Deresse families, that means answers about emergency response times, hospital routing, and the decision not to treat earlier warning signs as threats. For the Kirk case, it means public access to the security audits that preceded the event, disclosure of contractor roles, and acknowledgment of how institutional complacency turned into vulnerability. Transparency in these areas would do more for public safety than any new round of enforcement or rhetoric.
The connective tissue between these tragedies is therefore not coincidence but system design. Both reveal how procedures that seem solid on paper can collapse under the weight of habit and assumption. Both expose how empathy, that essential lubricant of civic life, erodes when institutions speak in bulletins instead of explanations. And both remind us that accountability is not a spectacle but a discipline, measured not by arrests or polished press conferences, but by the integrity of what follows once headlines fade.
The temptation, always, is to move on. Grief subsides, outrage cools, and the next crisis claims attention. But every unresolved inconsistency accumulates, like sediment, in the public consciousness. Over time it hardens into mistrust. The families of Eden, Feven, and Bemnet carry that mistrust alongside their loss. So, in a different way, do the supporters of Charlie Kirk who wonder how an event designed to showcase civic engagement became the stage for assassination. Their questions, though born of different worlds, converge on the same demand: that institutions meant to serve the living stop hiding behind the convenient silence of the dead.
