Muhammad Aziz Umurzakov, teen killed in Brown shooting, was dragged to study session by a friend, text reveals
An 18‑year‑old student who was aiming to become a neurosurgeon was killed in the Brown University shooting. He had been “dragged” by a friend to an economics review session, where the tragedy unfolded, a fellow student said on Friday while appearing on WJAR‑TV.
The Uzbek national, Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, texted a buddy an hour before the shooting: “Got dragged to Econ review,” and attached a photo of the study hall that would soon be riddled with bullets.
Within the next hour, Umurzokov and 19‑year‑old Ella Cook were killed, while nine more students sustained injuries.
One of the classmates who went with Umurzokov was wounded. Joseph McGonagle, who had spent the morning having brunch with his friend and then sat in the library beside the targeted classroom, told a local Rhode Island outlet that Brown had always been known as “the Happy Ivy.” He added that nobody could have imagined a violence of this kind happening there.
The shooter, identified as Claudio Neves Valente—a 48‑year‑old Portuguese national and former physics graduate student who had attended Brown for only three semesters before dropping out in 2003—was captured in surveillance footage and later took his own life as police closed in.
Valente had been known to complain about everything from cafeteria fish to class difficulty, and while some classmates remembered him as kind and smart, others recalled him as a bully.
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