DRAPER, Utah — Bryan Cunningham remembers being in a meeting talking about the threat of an active shooter on the campus of Utah Valley University.
“We begged,” Cunningham recalled. “We begged when I was there. This is going to be an active shooter situation nightmare if you don’t give us more officers.
“Give us more resources. Help us put together a plan. And it just was not done.”
One of the other people in the meeting – Val Peterson, UVU’s vice president of administration and a member of the Utah House of Representatives.
“We asked Val,” Cunningham said, “and his comment to me and every other officer in that department that day, ‘It’s been 25 years. We haven’t had one and we’re not going to have one.’
“I looked him in the face, and I said, ‘It’s not if. It’s when.’”
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The "when" arrived Wednesday when a rifleman shot and killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk as he spoke to a crowd of a few thousand at UVU’s amphitheater.
UVU spokesman Scott Trotter on Thursday, in an email to FOX 13 News, said, “UVU’s Police Department discussed the security with the Kirk security team before the event, and the analysis was that there were no credible threats.
“UVU is an open campus; no metal detectors were set up. It was in an open courtyard.”
Trotter did not respond to questions about discussions years earlier with Peterson.
UVU has said six of its police officers were on duty Wednesday during the Kirk speech.
In 2024, UVU reported employing 23 police officers for a campus of 46,000 students and all the faculty and staff that serve them. By comparison, 46,000 Spanish Fork reported employing 42 police officers.
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Cunningham, who left UVU police in 2018, said, for the Kirk speech, UVU could have called on officers from neighboring police forces. A key focus, he said, should have been on any positions looking down on Kirk.
“There should have been planning,” Cunningham said. “There should have been other police departments involved.”
“This was a high-profile individual,” Cunningham said of Kirk. “He was a supporter of Trump. He was in his campaign.”
Former FBI agent Greg Rogers told FOX 13’s Good Day Utah that there should have been security preventing a shooter on the roof.
“If drones were up,” Rogers said, “and he'd have been spotted on the roof…. That is a security failure that can't be defended.”
FOX 13 News also spoke to a police officer who currently works in the Orem area. That officer declined to go on camera for fear of retaliation, but corroborated what Cunningham said.
That officer also said some of UVU’s police officers did not know Kirk was coming to UVU on Wednesday.
Cunningham said security was better at the 2017 Love Loud concert, featuring Imagine Dragons. The concert was held at UVU’s baseball stadium.
“We actually had a command center set up,” Cunningham recalled. “We had Utah County sheriffs help us out. SWAT Team was there. Orem City police department there.”
There was also medical personnel and an emergency management trailer at the concert, Cunningham said.
“They dropped the ball on this one, and Charlie Kirk is dead because of it,” Cunningham said.
Cunningham offered his prayers and condolences to the Kirk family.