Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a victim in the Brown University shooting, was a kind, selfless person who dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon, his sisters have told Newsweek.
They desperately tried to get in touch with their brother, an 18-year-old freshman at Brown, when they learned of the shooting on the university’s campus in Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday afternoon, Rukhsora Umurzokova, 22, and Samira Umurzokova, 15, said.
When he didn’t respond to their many calls or texts, they contacted his friends at the university on social media and found out he had been in the classroom inside the engineering building where the shooting occurred.
In the early hours on Sunday, they received a phone call from a Brown official informing them their brother had been killed. Another student, Ella Cook, a sophomore from Birmingham, Alabama, was also killed while nine others were wounded. A search for the gunman was still underway on Tuesday.
On Saturday morning, Mukhammad Umurzokov’s parents set off for Saudi Arabia to perform the Umrah pilgrimage in Mecca with relatives.
“Right before they got on the plane, they called my brother and they let him know they were on the plane safely,” Rukhsora Umurzokova told Newsweek.
“They were saying hopefully next year, make sure you plan accordingly, we’re all gonna go together. That was the last thing that my mom and my brother and my dad talked about.”
She said she broke the news to her parents shortly after their flight landed in Saudi Arabia and they immediately made the journey back to the U.S. and traveled to Providence.
The family immigrated to the United States from Uzbekistan in the summer of 2011 and became naturalized U.S. citizens. They first lived in New York City before moving to Midlothian, a suburb of Richmond, Virginia.
Mukhammad Umurzokov’s sisters described their brother as an extrovert who quickly formed bonds with people and often went out of his way to help others.
“He was so gentle and he was so nice to everybody around him,” Rukhsora Umurzokova said. “He was so helpful to all of his friends, his family, everybody.”
She said he decided on his career path at a young age after undergoing surgery for Chiari malformation, a neurological condition where spinal fluid puts pressure on the brain and spinal cord.
“His doctor was asking, ‘Hey, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I want to be a neurosurgeon like you,’” she said.
He worked hard in high school and earned a scholarship to Brown, where he was double majoring in biochemistry and neuroscience.
“He was working super hard to get into medical school,” Samira Umurzokova said.
“He was incredibly funny, kind and super smart. He was the smartest person I ever knew,” Rukhsora Umurzokova added. “He just was an incredibly ambitious person and he actually got the opportunity to pursue his dreams and it’s just horrible that that was taken away from him.”
His sisters said he had been planning to return home for the winter break on Thursday and was looking forward to spending time with Rukhsora Umurzokova’s 5-month-old daughter.
“He was just amazing with her…he was saying he was so excited to come back and to see her again,” she said.
Mukhammad Umurzokov had been preparing for finals as his first semester at Brown drew to a close. But when the shooting erupted, he had been helping a friend at an economics final review session.
“I think that just shows his personality, he just wanted to help everyone. He always puts other people first,” his elder sister said.
The sisters said they set up a GoFundMe page to help ease the financial burden on their parents on Sunday. Since then, it has garnered more than 8,000 donations and raised more than $400,000.
The family want his body to be returned to Virginia as soon as possible so they can give him an Islamic funeral, which involves a quick burial.
Rukhsora Umurzokova said after the funeral expenses are covered, the family will put the remaining donations toward charitable causes their brother would have supported.
“We’re incredibly thankful and we promise that we are going to put the money to good use,” she said. “We’re thinking about what he would want to do with the money, what kind of things he was interested in.”
