‘He had this knowing, Mona Lisa-like half-smile’

Charlie Kirk’s grieving widow, Erika, described the moment she saw her husband’s body in the hospital after the conservative influencer was assassinated — as she insisted he “died happy.”

“His eyes were semi-open and he had this knowing, Mona Lisa-like half-smile. Like he’d died happy. Like Jesus rescued him. The bullet came, he blinked, and he was in heaven,” Erika Kirk said in an emotional interview with the New York Times.

Kirk also revealed the sheriff advised her against seeing her husband’s body due to the damage the bullet had done to his neck.

“With all due respect, I want to see what they did to my husband,” the brave mom-of-two recalled telling the sheriff.

Kirk said she was able to kiss her beloved goodbye at the hospital, something she had been unable to do that morning as he set off for what would turn out to be his final event, a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University.

Kirk also gave a deeply moving speech at her husband’s enormous memorial service Sunday at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale Arizona, where she forgave his killer.

“He wanted to save young men. Just like the one who took his life,” she said through her tears.
“I forgive him because it was what Christ did. And what Charlie would do.”