Demartravion 'Trey' Reed Vs Charlie Kirk: A tale of two deaths

In America, even death runs on a caste system. Some deaths arrive wrapped in hashtags, vigils, and capital charges announced on live TV. Others are smothered in bureaucratic footnotes, labelled “pending investigation,” and left to rot in the back pages. The republic doesn’t mourn equally; it triages.

Two recent cases prove the point. Demartravion “Trey” Reed, a 21-year-old Black student, was found hanging from a tree at Delta State University in Mississippi. A week earlier, conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk was shot dead while speaking at Utah Valley University. Both were young. Both met violent ends. Only one, however, triggered cabinet-level statements, saturation coverage, and hashtags about civil war.


Kirk’s killing played like a Netflix script: a crowd of thousands, a crack of gunfire, a body collapsing mid-speech. The alleged assassin, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was no mystery man. He left a note under his keyboard declaring his intent, texted confessions to his partner, and even engraved messages onto bullet casings like a teenage edgelord. His parents recognised him in manhunt photos, coaxed him into surrender, and prosecutors promptly announced they’d seek the death penalty.

For Trump’s America, it was a ready-made morality play. Kirk was instantly canonised as a martyr for free speech, his death proof that the culture war had gone hot. The right had its fallen soldier; the media had its spectacle.


Reed’s case was different. Found hanging from a tree in Mississippi, his death summoned the ghosts of America’s oldest crime scene. Officials rushed to say there were no signs of assault, that a preliminary exam showed no broken bones. The university cancelled classes. Students held vigils. His family demanded an independent autopsy. And then silence.

The symbolism was unbearable—Black body, Southern tree, Mississippi soil—but the narrative was muddy. Suicide? Lynching? No one knew. And in the hierarchy of American news, ambiguity is the kiss of death. Without a suspect, a manifesto, or a courtroom, the story flickered out.


Kirk’s case had all the elements of modern outrage theatre: a celebrity victim, a named suspect, a clear weapon, a prosecutorial script that framed it as political assassination. Editors barely had to lift a finger.

Reed’s case, by contrast, is all ellipses. Preliminary findings but no closure, historical resonance but no indictment. It asks America to confront its lynching past at a time when America would rather binge on political drama. One story is spectacle. The other is homework. And we know which one the algorithm prefers.


Kirk’s afterlife is already a battlefield. To some, he’s a free-speech martyr gunned down for his beliefs. To others, he’s a provocateur who finally collided with the hatred he amplified. Either way, he’ll be remembered—invoked in campaign speeches, dissected in documentaries, immortalised in MAGA lore.

Reed’s afterlife, meanwhile, risks becoming a statistic. Unless activists and his family keep the pressure alive, his name will be remembered only in vigils, on placards, and in a line of a coroner’s report.


In the end, the comparison isn’t just about two murders. It’s about two Americas. One that never shuts up, whose deaths are televised, politicised, mythologised. And one that has been gagged for centuries, whose deaths are explained away with words like “no foul play suspected.”

Charlie Kirk’s death will echo in politics for years. Trey Reed’s may vanish into silence unless the country chooses otherwise. And that is the true story here: not Kirk versus Reed, not left versus right, but remembered versus forgotten.

That’s how the republic keeps score.