Ryne Simmons Reportedly Told to Delete His 4K Video (Claims)
:::caution Attributed claims only Asking a witness not to retain or circulate graphic footage of a homicide is a common and lawful request once the original has been secured. What follows are reported witness accounts, not findings that any agent did anything improper. :::
Claim snapshot
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| The claim | Simmons says he filmed the shooting in 4K, sent it to the FBI to help, and was then instructed to delete his copy — with follow-up calls to confirm the deletion |
| Raised by | Ryne Simmons (his own account, via @ninoboxer); a parallel claim about Skylar Bard as characterized by @ProjectConstitu |
| First surfaced | @ninoboxer post; @ProjectConstitu post |
| Rests on | Named witness account — the witness describing his own experience |
| Evidence rating | EMERGING — but stronger than an anonymous claim |
What is alleged
Ryne Simmons says he witnessed Charlie Kirk's assassination and filmed it at 4K, 60 frames per second — by the investigation file's description, a close-up and a critical piece of footage. Per his account, he sent the video to the FBI to help investigators. He says he was then instructed to delete his copy. The investigation file adds that the FBI "at Federal level called a few times to make sure video was deleted."
Simmons reportedly saved the footage anyway. That detail matters in both directions. It undercuts any suggestion he was compelled — nobody seized his phone, and he retained the file — but it is also the reason the account can be examined at all, because a witness who complied would have left nothing behind.
A parallel claim runs alongside it. Per @ProjectConstitu, eyewitness Skylar Bard said federal agents asked him to delete phone footage, and the request was framed as being for his own psychological wellbeing — a "PTSD" rationale. That post is written in a highly rhetorical register and makes a wide sweep of additional claims about archive sites and metadata that are not evidence for this specific item and are not adopted here. The narrow, checkable core is: a second named witness reportedly describing a similar request.
The investigators' argument is that the highest-resolution independent footage of the shooting — the kind of record that could resolve trajectory, timing, and the question of how many shots were fired — is precisely the footage a witness was asked to stop holding. Their inference is that a curated public record is easier to manage than a distributed one. That is the inference; it is not established.
The ordinary explanation
Once the FBI holds the original file, agents routinely ask witnesses not to retain or circulate graphic footage of a homicide, and the reasons are entirely respectable. Publicly circulating video of a killing prejudices the jury pool in a capital case, which the defense would rightly move on. It hands the investigation a chain-of-custody headache when a dozen re-encoded copies begin circulating with the original's metadata stripped. And distributing a video of a man being shot to death is genuinely harmful — to the witness who filmed it, to a grieving family, and to the public. A "PTSD" rationale offered to a traumatized eyewitness is not obviously a wink; it may simply be what an agent actually believed.
A request is not an order. The FBI had no authority to compel deletion, did not seize the device, and the plain fact that Simmons still has the file demonstrates no compulsion occurred. Repeat calls are consistent with ordinary evidence-handling follow-up, particularly where an agency is trying to establish, for the record, whether duplicate copies of a piece of evidence remain in the wild — which is something a prosecutor will be asked about at trial.
The strongest version of this item is therefore not "the FBI suppressed evidence." It is the narrower and still legitimate question of whether asking a witness to destroy his own copy of evidence in an active homicide is the right practice at all, given that it puts the sole surviving record in the hands of one party.
What would settle it
- Obtain Simmons's 4K file with intact metadata and have it independently examined — he reportedly still has it.
- Ask the FBI, on the record, whether any policy or guidance authorizes requesting that witnesses delete original recordings of a crime after submission.
- Pull the contact log for the reported follow-up calls: dates, times, and the field office or unit that placed them.
- Ask Skylar Bard directly, on the record, what he was told and by whom.