Growing up, MukhammadAziz Umurzokov would spend hours analyzing scans of his own spinal cord — scrutinizing his nerves, his disks, his bones, noticing how they shifted after the surgery that changed his life.
Umurzokov was 7 when he was diagnosed with Chiari malformation and met Dr. Jeffrey Wisoff. The neurosurgeon removed a small piece of the back of Umurzokov’s skull to restore normal flow of spinal fluid, and, in the process, led Umurzokov to his dream of becoming a doctor. From then on, Umurzokov wanted to help other children suffering from neurological conditions like his.
The pair lost touch over the years, but they never forgot each other. In August, before moving into his dorm at Brown University, Umurzokov sent Wisoff an email asking to reconnect. The two decided to meet in New York in the new year, to discuss Umurzokov’s future career in medicine.
Their meeting will never happen, and Umurzokov will never perform surgery. On Dec. 13, with three finals left in the first semester of his freshman year, Umurzokov was shot dead during an economics review session at Brown University. In its bloody wake, the attack has left his campus shaken, his family grieving, and his dreams unfinished.
For Wisoff — who besides his connection to Umurzokov knows what it is to treat trauma victims — it has been impossible to make sense of the tragedy.
“I cared for kids with gunshot wounds,” he said. “And yet suddenly, when it happens to someone you know, and even more so, someone who you had cared for and you cured and had this incredibly bright future, it’s like a candle being snuffed out.”
“I have no doubt that he would have pursued his dream,” Wisoff added. “He would have become a neurosurgeon.”
An immigrant from Uzbekistan who moved to the United States at age 4, Umurzokov faced adversity from a young age. His family first settled in New York before moving to Virginia in 2020. He was a devout Muslim, with two sisters who revered him as a calming, supportive presence — a great brother and uncle.
“My brother was the kindest, smartest, funniest person I’ve ever known,” said Samira Umurzokova, his 15-year-old sister. “He never said no to anything that we asked of him.”
By high school, he had become a confident young man and a bright student. In addition to taking 18 AP courses — a record at Midlothian High School in Virginia, his sisters said — Umurzokov was the president of his school’s Model United Nations club, and led its Scholastic Bowl team. He also volunteered to tutor newly arrived immigrant children at his high school.
Umurzokov was always doing that — helping the kids who came behind him, facing the challenges he had already overcome. He was the friend willing to help anyone with any subject at any time, those who knew him said. Maddox Johnson, a high school classmate, remembered calling Umurzokov past midnight to ask for help while studying for a physics exam. Umurzokov was always happy to help, and he could break down difficult concepts with ease, Johnson said.
In helping his classmates, Umurzokov “found his purpose,” Johnson said, “and from there, everyone knew him.”
“If you heard the name Mukhammad, you knew who he was,” Johnson said. “All the teachers knew him. . . . Two thousand kids in the school, and everyone knew Mukhammad. That’s the kind of guy he was.”
“Muk,” as his friends at Brown called him, was easy to talk to. He could join and contribute to any conversation, from popular internet memes and relationship advice, to the French Revolution and quantum physics.
“He had this witty, sarcastic commentary,” said Josiah De Paz, a freshman and Umurzokov’s chemistry classmate. “He made everybody laugh.”
Umurzokov spent hours in student lounges and dining halls at Brown, hanging out with friends and meeting new people. He always remembered people’s names and what they were studying, his friends said.
De Paz said he’ll never forget the long night Umurzokov and two other friends spent in a dorm lounge. They were supposed to be studying; instead, they talked and laughed until 5 a.m.
Umurzokov was always one for quality time — perhaps less often “quality sleep,” De Paz joked.
“Now, I really understand why these really small moments are really important in the grand scheme of things,” De Paz said. “That night may not have been that significant then, but I’m really going to remember that.”
Despite all the time he spent with friends at Brown, Umurzokov stood out as a student even in a highly competitive academic environment.
While many students interested in medicine think of their science requirements as obstacles to get through, Umurzokov was deeply interested.
“He would always sit in the front row, and he would always ask me very technical questions,” said Brenda Rubenstein, a Brown chemistry professor who taught Umurzokov this semester. He was the kind of student professors love, she said.
“This was someone who was exceptional,” she added. “This was someone who was naturally brilliant but also naturally kind. Those are exactly the kinds of people that you want to see in society. You want more of those people, not fewer of them.”
On Sunday, the day after the shooting, Rubenstein entered Umurzokov’s final grade into the system — “a very high A,” she said. She hadn’t realized he had been killed.
“It feels really terrible to send that A into the ether,” she said. “It’s deeply tragic.”
Umurzokov had a lot of plans for what might happen after Saturday’s review sessions — big plans, small plans. Getting back some good grades. Med school in a few years, and residency after that.
In the more immediate term: a night out on Saturday — dinner, movies, and cookies with someone special.
Jack DiPrimio, a graduate student at Brown, said he knew how much his friend Umurzokov was looking forward to what came after finals. It haunts him that he’ll never know which movie his friend had settled on for Saturday evening: “Five Nights at Freddy’s” or “Wicked.” (DiPrimio strongly favored the latter.)
The two met at an academic lecture, when the visiting scholar admonished DiPrimio for a question he asked, and Umurzokov approached him afterward to comfort and reassure him that the scholar had acted badly. The two became fast friends, texting about movies, and meeting up at Josiah’s, the quintessential late-night Brown hangout diner.
“If he was still alive and he knew that there was a shooting and that people were dead, I know he would be so livid about it — the injustice of it all," DiPrimio said. “I know how heartfelt he would be, because he cared about people.”
His older sister, 22-year-old Rukhsora Umurzokova, said he died “like a martyr.”
“This was such an unfair and unjust killing,” she said.
A couple of nights before the shooting, Astrid Albujar, one of Umurzokov’s neuroscience classmates, was walking back to her dorm late. It was past 11 p.m, and it was freezing cold, she said. She ran into Umurzokov outside the campus center, standing by himself. The two lived on the same dorm floor, and she asked if he wanted to walk home together.
He said no. He was waiting for a friend.
“That interaction, it’s basically what describes him,” Albujar said. “He was the type of person that would wait for a friend late at night, in the cold, even if somebody else asked him if he wanted to leave. . . . He would have stayed there for hours and hours and hours until this friend came.”
Umurzokov made his friends feel heard and safe, Albujar said.
He would walk 20 minutes across campus just so a friend wouldn’t have to walk alone. He would stay up late to help friends with homework on any topic. He would go on Target runs with friends when he didn’t need to buy anything.
He would attend a review session for a class he wasn’t even taking. On Saturday, that act of generosity led him to his last breaths.
“Even the way he died describes him. He wasn’t even in econ,” Albujar said. “He sat through the entire, long, tiring, boring review session just to be with his friend. That was him.”
Marcela Rodrigues can be reached at marcela.rodrigues@globe.com.