Was the assassination of Charlie Kirk preventable? Yes. And now the Kirk family has taken the first legal step toward making a court decide the same thing. I have reported extensively on the Secret Service's failure at the attempted assassination of Trump at Butler as the worst security breach in decades. Reading the Kirk family's legal notice this morning, I keep returning to how structurally similar the two failures are — separated by fourteen months, by a change of state and victim, but built from the same key fact: the rooftop from which a sniper fired was a known vulnerability, flagged in advance, and left uncovered anyway. Kirk’s assassination is marked by a string of security failures that, once laid out, are hard to look at as anything but gross negligence. Just a few changes could have prevented it. A few highlights •Utah Valley University assigned only six campus police officers to cover an event with 3,000 attendees in an open-air setting. •UVU did not increase its security despite what the Kirk family describes as a high threat level before the event. •UVU did not have a written security plan or do a pre-event security briefing. •Two days before the event, Kirk's security chief, Brian Harpole, texted UVU Police Chief Jeffrey Long directly, warning that students had rooftop access near where Kirk would be speaking. Long's reply: "I got you covered." But no drones were used to sweep the rally. Not a single security officer was assigned to monitor the roofs of adjacent buildings that provided a straight line of sight for an assassin. Tyler Robinson fired from the roof of the Losee Center, roughly 415 feet from where Kirk was speaking. •Campus police failed to monitor surveillance cameras in real time — had they done so, they might have seen Robinson getting access to the roof and setting up his sniper’s nest. •What was not then known was that Chief Long himself had requested UVU add six more officers, and then-President Astrid Tuminez denied the request. •UVU did not use any metal detectors, had no bag checks, and did not coordinate an advance risk assessment with local law enforcement in Orem. •In other cases in which UVU had a controversial or high-risk event, it had moved it indoors and limited the number of attendees in order to have better control over the security. •When Kirk was shot, there was no ambulance staged at the event. He was driven to the hospital in a private vehicle. The family's attorney makes the obvious point explicitly: the risk of a rooftop shooter should have been "especially top-of-mind" given the attempt on President Trump's life by a rooftop shooter 14 months earlier. The family's legal notice — filed under Utah's wrongful-death statute, a required precursor to a lawsuit — names UVU, then-president Astrid Tuminez, Chief Long, the campus police department, and the state itself. Remember, a civil wrongful-death claim doesn't require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It requires a preponderance of the evidence, simply that it is more likely than not that negligence caused the death. Given what's already public — a specific written warning, a specific verbal assurance, and a rooftop that went unwatched anyway — I do not think that will be a high bar for the family's attorneys to clear.