Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov’s two sisters watched news of the shooting at Brown University on Saturday afternoon from their home in the Richmond suburb of Midlothian with a mounting sense of dread.
Mukhammad wasn’t responding to calls or texts, but as a double major in biochemistry and neuroscience, he had no reason to be in the economics study session where two people were killed and nine others wounded by a gunman. Then the sisters tracked down some of his friends through Instagram and learned the awful truth: He was in the classroom, just to be with some buddies, and — typically — he had been sitting up front.
By about 2 or 3 o’clock Sunday morning, a university official confirmed to them that Umurzokov, an 18-year-old freshman, had been killed.
“It just seems so unfair, because he tried so hard and he went through so much, just to wind up like this,” Rukhsora Umurzokova, 22, said Sunday evening in the family’s living room.
Her brother had been a straight-A student at Midlothian High School who participated in Model United Nations, Quiz Bowl and debate — a young man in a hurry to make his mark.
When he was a child, Umurzokov had a condition that required brain surgery and left him facing years of recovery, his sister said. The experience created an unshakable ambition to become a brain surgeon, she said.
He took every Advanced Placement class he could, earned a scholarship to Brown and worked at Wawa over the summer to make enough money to buy a laptop, according to his two sisters.
“He didn’t get any outside tutoring or anything. He did everything himself,” Umurzokova said. “And then he was so excited to go to Brown this fall. He was saying, like, ‘This is the best year of my life. I’m so happy here.’ He had just visited us at Thanksgiving.”
The family had put a Brown University sign in the front yard of their home. They moved to Midlothian in 2011 from Brooklyn, seeking a safer and quieter lifestyle, the sisters said. They had immigrated from Uzbekistan two years before and all became U.S. citizens, Umurzokova said.
Their mother is a nurse. Their father owns a trucking company and drives long-haul.
After planning and saving for years, her parents flew out Saturday morning with other relatives for an Umrah pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Umurzokova and her younger sister reached them by phone when their plane landed in Egypt for a layover to tell them their brother was missing, then broke the news of his death when the couple landed in Saudi Arabia.
The parents immediately returned to New York, where Umurzokova’s husband was driving to meet them at the airport and take them to Rhode Island.
They are “devastated,” Umurzokova said. So much hope had been placed on her brother. “We all have that, like, American Dream,” she said. “And my parents have been telling us from the beginning, like, ‘You guys have to do these great things.’ … It’s just such a loss.”
Todd Wallack contributed to this report.
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