The KSL Interview Where A Witness Describes A Neck Wound And Cheering
What This Video Is
Fifty-three seconds of a television field interview, reposted to X by the account @MuppetMasher. A KSL TV 5 reporter in a pink blazer holds a branded microphone; a young man in a grey and white checked shirt answers on camera, standing on the UVU campus with a green and brown wolverine inflatable behind him. It is a straight broadcast capture with a single split-frame transition effect partway through and no other editing.
This is one of the more valuable witness records in the archive, for two reasons. It was recorded on campus in the immediate aftermath rather than assembled later, and the account it contains cuts against the pattern in several other early interviews.
What Is Said
The witness describes what he was doing when it happened, and the detail places him precisely in the moment: "I was just watching him speak, and he was talking about gang violence, and then I just hear like a loud pop, and I'm looking at him, and it doesn't even look real."
He reports one sound, not several, and he describes it as a pop rather than a rifle report, which is consistent with how a number of other attendees characterised it.
He then gives the account the clip is best known for: "There were some group of people at the top, they cheered when he got shot. And I was just appalled." He offers no identification of anyone in that group, and none is offered here.
Asked by the reporter whether he had a sense of direction, and whether he thought there was one shooter, he answers with the two things that make his statement significant: "I was facing towards him, and it looked like the shot came from my left, so his right, and it just went through his neck and out the other side. It was, it was gruesome."
Two points deserve emphasis. First, he describes a neck wound and a through-and-through path, not a chest or heart wound. Several early on-camera witnesses described a chest or heart wound, and the discrepancy between those accounts and this one is one of the live questions in this investigation. This interview belongs on the neck side of that ledger. Second, he gives a direction relative to his own body and then converts it to the stage's frame of reference himself, which is more careful than most contemporaneous witness statements and makes the account usable for geometry.
As with any bystander interview given minutes after a violent event, this is one person's perception under extreme stress, not a finding. He does not claim to have seen a shooter and does not speculate about distance.
What The Footage Shows
A static medium close-up for the whole duration, with the reporter in profile at the left and the witness centre-right. He speaks and gestures with both hands, points upward with his left index finger while describing the group he says cheered, and later traces the path of the wound across his own neck with his hand. A second young man stands partly visible behind the microphone at the left edge; a pedestrian crosses the far background. The KSL TV 5 mark appears on the microphone and as a lower-third logo.
The bystanders in frame are not identified and are not named here.
How It Connects
The site's page on this witness is Nick, within the witnesses section.
His neck account sits against the early chest and heart descriptions collected at wrong witnesses, shot to the heart, shot in chest reversal and chest shot witnesses. For the physical question his directional statement bears on, see wound trajectory angle, acoustics from the south and shooting locations.
For how his account fits the sequence, see the 12:23 shooting time. The reposting account is at @muppetmasher.