71 year-old Utah resident George Zinn on September 10, 2025

New reporting is shedding light on the man who was initially detained by mistake in the aftermath of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk's death while speaking at a Utah college campus on Wednesday.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported Wednesday that 71 year-old George Zinn was mistakenly arrested as a suspect after Kirk was killed by a single gunshot while addressing a crowd of students. Police can be heard saying in video of Zinn's arrest: "He said he shot him, but I don't know."

According to the Tribune, Zinn is a "gadfly" with a history of arrests for "misdemeanor offenses." When the City Creek Center Mall opened up in Salt Lake City in March of 2012, Zinn was thrown out by security personnel. In a post to his Facebook page, Zinn suggested that his action was in response to the perceived hypocrisy of the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS).

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"The LDS Church has preached for years about extravagant materialism, and then it sponsors a huge megacenter in the heart of the city. I wonder if Brother Brigham really saw all this in vision when he stopped his carriage and looked at the valley that day in 1847," he wrote.

In May of this year, Zinn was arrested for sitting in the middle of a road in Ogden, Utah. The police report showed he was arrested on a "pedestrian in roadway" charge.

“George stated he didn’t care if the vehicles waited all day. I told George he needed to wait on the sidewalk, and not in the roadway,” the report read. “ He told me he did not care, and to take him to jail.”

Zinn is no longer considered a suspect in Kirk's shooting. The FBI said it had a person of interest in custody, but later released them after an interrogation, according to FBI Director Kash Patel. The shooter remains at large.

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Click here to read the Tribune's full report.