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Utah officials say they were contacted by family friend of Tyler Robinson, 22, accused of killing rightwing activist

The initial portrait emerging of the man authorities say killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah is a complicated one.

Tyler James Robinson, 22, was arrested on Thursday after contacting a family friend who then contacted the sheriff’s office in Washington county, Utah, officials said. Washington county is 260 miles south of Orem, home of Utah Valley University (UVU), where Kirk was killed.

Fatal shooting occurred during protest outside the Ice processing center in Broadview, Illinois

A man was fatally shot during a vehicle stop on the outskirts of Chicago by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers after attempting to flee the scene, according to officials, and another officer was injured during the altercation.

The incident occurred during a daylong protest unfolding outside the Ice processing center in Broadview, Illinois, where demonstrators clashed with federal government agents Friday morning.

FBI said threats were ‘hoax calls’, although universities took measures to prevent incidences on campuses

• Charlie Kirk shooting – follow the latest updates

Black students across the US were targeted this week by coordinated racist death threats, forcing at least seven historically Black colleges into emergency lockdowns just a day after far-right activist Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University.

At New York University, Black students reportedly received a threatening manifesto specifically targeting them, according to an email seen by the Guardian from the university’s Black Student Union. The manifesto was said to contain “extremely graphic threats of gun violence” and stated the author was “coming for only n******”, citing the number of Black students as taking away from a “safe space” for white people.

In their humane responses to the killing of Charlie Kirk, Democrats are observing the old norms. Things are different now: anger and division rule

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The killing of Charlie Kirk has left the US and those who care about it on edge. The arrest of a suspect, Tyler Robinson, has hardly settled the nerves, not when the revelation of any supposed political allegiances could touch off a fresh round of recriminations. The fear is that the country is about to descend into a new era of political violence, becoming a place where differences are settled not with words and argument but by guns and blood. After all, it has plumbed those depths before.

The US was born in violence, fought a civil war less than a century after its founding and in living memory seemed to be on the brink of another one – with a spate of assassinations in the 1960s that took the lives of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and John and Bobby Kennedy. That should provide some consolation, the knowledge that the country has been through this before and survived.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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