A leading Utah Democrat is sick of being blamed for Charlie Kirk's assassination, saying she wasn't familiar with the right-wing influencer before he was fatally shot last week.
Democratic state legislators started getting voice messages calling them "demons" and "enemies to the American people" hours after the conservative activist was gunned down at Utah Valley University, House minority leader Angela Romero told CNN's "Situation Room."
She said callers explicitly blamed her and her colleagues for Kirk's death and graphically threatened to harm them if they didn't leave the state.
"If I don't agree with someone, it doesn't mean that I'm silent," Romero said, "and so I think as we continue these conversations, when we're talking about issues that are political, we shouldn't have to back away. But it's how you address it, like, you're not going to see me on social media degrading my colleagues or degrading what they believe in, but at the same time, when we have discussions about hot topics, when it comes to DEI, whether it's talking about health care, whether it's talking about the economy, I think it's important that we're having those honest conversations."
Romero and her Republican counterpart Casey Snider have both condemned political violence in the wake of Kirk's slaying, but she's not sure whether legislative action would follow his murder.
"We haven't had that conversation yet," Romero said. "We have interim meetings this week, and so those are conversations we're going to have. I've had some of my Republican colleagues reach out to me because some of us have been receiving intimidating phone calls or messages, emails, because we're being blamed for the murder of Charlie Kirk.
"I didn't know who Charlie Kirk was really prior to this happening, and so it's it's been a real eye-opener for me because I want to talk about gun control, that I'm being blamed for someone's death."
"I mean, I run a lot of legislation on sexual violence, so I'm used to getting threatening phone calls," she added. "And I hate to say that the majority of those phone calls are coming from men, and this particular call, out of all the calls we've received, it's not like we've had a lot of phone calls, but out of the phone calls we received, this particular individual decided to call up almost every Democrat and the Democratic Party and just call us names and tell us to move out of the state of Utah, and it was the tone of his voice that was really frightening because we have families just like Charlie Kirk does.
"All of us are here because we want to serve the public, we want to do the best for Utahns. We want to make sure that our families feel safe, as well, and a lot of people didn't even want me to come on the news today because they're afraid of the phone calls I'll get after this, and that's sad."
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