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AMY GOODMAN: The two students killed in Saturday’s shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, have been identified. They’re 18-year-old freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov from Virginia, and 19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook from Mountain Brook, Alabama.
Umurzokov’s family came to the United States from Uzbekistan in 2011. Family and classmates have described him as “gentle,” “kind” and “extroverted.” He wanted to become a neurosurgeon one day, inspired by doctors who treated him as a child. His sister, Rukhsora Umurzokova, told NBC News, quote, “We don’t want him to end up being a number. We want everyone to see his face. We want everyone to know his name,” she said.
Nineteen-year-old sophomore Ella Cook is described by those close to her as “grounded,” “generous” and “incredibly kind.” She was also a devoted Christian, talented piano player, vice president of the College Republican Club at Brown.
Both students were planning to travel home for winter break in the coming days.
As family, friends and the university community continue to mourn their loss, the search for the gunman who opened fire on Saturday, killing both students and injuring nine others, has entered its fourth day. On Monday, authorities released new images of a person of interest, including video from home surveillance cameras. This is FBI Special Agent in Charge Ted Docks.
TED DOCKS: We are renewing our call for the public’s assistance in seeking any and all information about the shooter. No amount of information is too small or irrelevant. We are also here to announce the FBI is now offering a reward of $50,000 for information that can lead to the identification, the arrest and the conviction of the individual responsible, who we believe to be armed and dangerous.
AMY GOODMAN: There have been 391 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, including at least 75 school shootings.
For at least two students at Brown University, this is not their first school shooting. Yesterday, we spoke to Mia Tretta, a 21-year-old junior who was shot in the stomach as a high school freshman at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, in 2019. Today, we’re joined by Zoe Weissman. Zoe was in middle school in 2018 when a former student opened fire next door at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 students and staff. Zoe has left Brown and gone home to Parkland, where we’re speaking to her today.
Zoe, our deepest condolences on what has happened at Brown, not to mention what happened seven years ago, where you were a middle schooler next door in Parkland, Florida. I’m just wondering if you could start off by talking about how you’re feeling right now, where you were when the gunman opened fire at Brown, and how you responded.
ZOE WEISSMAN: Thank you for having me.
So, thankfully, I was in my dorm room when everything happened. I got a call from my friend probably minutes after the shooting occurred, and she asked me if I was in Barus and Holley, which is the building where the shooting happened. And just the way she said it, I knew that it was a school shooting. That’s where my brain went. And I told her that if that’s what happened, she needed to tell me. And she admitted that people had ran into where she was and told her that there was a shooter. And then, probably a minute or two after, I received the alerts on my phone from the school about an active shooter.
And so, then I was locked down in my dorm until 6 a.m. the next day, when they had a person of interest in custody, who ended up being released. And thankfully, now I’m back here in Parkland. But I think that because I’ve already processed all the grief and the sadness before — I’ve kind of, you know, been grappling with that for the past seven years — my, like, most predominant emotion right now is, honestly, anger.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Zoe, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 391 mass shootings this year, including 75 at school shootings. Your message to lawmakers who — most of whom have done little to next to nothing since the Parkland shooting?
ZOE WEISSMAN: Yeah, I just really want to emphasize that if politicians actually want to show that they care about their constituents and they want to be reelected, they need to show a concerted effort to pass gun violence prevention legislation on a federal level. And if they don’t do so, we’ll make sure to vote them out, because we are the only country where this happens, and we are — just so happen to be the only country that has more guns than people.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, in these last few days, we’ve heard the news of the mass shooting in Sydney. Australia. Your thoughts about how Australia has responded in the past and is responding now to this gun violence?
ZOE WEISSMAN: Yeah, I think we saw after the Port Arthur massacre, you know, years ago, that Australia made a very concerted effort to reduce gun violence. And although the tragedy on Bondi Beach happened, we’ve seen, I believe, only 35 mass shootings in Australia since those changes, compared to the U.S., where we’ve had thousands since that date. And we’re even seeing in the immediate aftermath of the shooting that politicians in the state and national premiers are actually announcing that they will be passing reforms to the gun legislation and rules and regulations within the country. And I think that that’s a great model for us to kind of look at. Unfortunately, our politicians care more about corporate funding than the lives of their constituents. But I think that Australia is definitely making good efforts after this shooting.
AMY GOODMAN: Zoe, I wanted to go to the prime minister of Australia, where, of course, we all know what happened this weekend in Sydney. A father and son killed at least 15 people in a mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach Sunday, 42 people injured, 22 remain in the hospital. Victims included a 10-year-old girl, a rabbi and a Holocaust survivor who died while shielding his wife from bullets. A different reaction in Australia, the deadliest since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, when a gunman opened fire in the Tasmanian tourist village of Port Arthur, killing 35, injuring 23 more. After that shooting, Australia, which had extremely liberal gun laws, a country of Crocodile Dundees, within days, outlawed automatic and semiautomatic rifles. On Monday, Australian federal and state government leaders agreed to immediately strengthen already-tough national gun control laws that came out of Port Arthur. Prime Minister Albanese vowed to revisit gun laws and said Bondi Beach shooting was different than Port Arthur in some ways.
PRIME MINISTER ANTHONY ALBANESE: We need to examine the gun laws that were carried in the wake of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. This is different from Port Arthur, though. Port Arthur was someone engaged in random violence against people. This is targeted. This is ideologically driven, and therefore is a different form of hatred and atrocity.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Zoe, I wanted to go back to you saying at the beginning of this conversation, you’re angry. What that reminded me of was what happened seven years ago in Parkland, where you live, where you grew up, where you were a middle schooler when the Parkland massacre happened, is the students there did something very different from most students all over the country who have survived school shootings. They immediately organized, saying they were angry, took on the Florida Legislature. Ultimately, the March for Our Lives took place in Washington, D.C. If you can talk about what you mean by being angry, and if you’re concerned with all the students going home — certainly understandable; they’ve just canceled Brown right now — right? — the tests, and all kids have gone home — that that level of all the students working together to fight for gun control will be dissipated, and what you’re planning to do in Parkland right now?
ZOE WEISSMAN: Yeah, so, March for Our Lives was an incredibly unique movement in the sense that it was student-led, right? I mean, we had seen movements in the past after school shootings, and those were mostly led by, you know, really compassionate adults. But this was one of the first-ever movements where it was actually students who were directly impacted leading everything.
I also do think it’s a little different at Brown, in the sense that our Legislature is already pretty friendly towards gun violence prevention measures. This past legislative session, they actually passed a sort of watered-down assault weapons ban that bans automatic weapons and assault rifles.
But I am actually not as worried about the dissipation of the student body as a lot of people are. I know my peers and my friends really well. We are a very politically active group of students. We’ve been very active in response to the federal compact proposed to Brown. We were a big part of making sure that our school rejected that. We’ve been very vocal in regards to the genocide occurring in Gaza, and as well as advocating for local causes. And I think that you’re really going to see a large concerted effort, once we get back on campus in mid to late January, from students. I think that I can speak for all of us that we’re angry and we’re ready to do something, not just on the state level, but on a federal one, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Interesting, Zoe, that you raised Gaza, because a fellow student at Brown, Hisham Awartani, whose mother we interviewed, was shot, himself a victim of gun violence, with two other Palestinian students when they went to Thanksgiving break in Vermont, shot by a guy sitting on his — what, standing on his porch, as they were wearing keffiyehs. How has what happened to Hisham, who came back to Brown in a wheelchair — he was paralyzed — affected the whole campus, another victim of gun violence?
ZOE WEISSMAN: Yeah, I think that, unfortunately, you know, the tragedy in Vermont just confirms that guns are the problem, right? There’s no one common denominator between all of these acts of violence, except guns and extremist ideology, whether that be antisemitism in Bondi Beach — you know, I myself have experienced a wave of antisemitism in response to all of the advocacy I’ve been doing — or whether it be Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiments. I think that regardless of the ideology, one thing remains true, and that is that people with extremist ideas and people who are willing to kill others are able to access guns in this country.
And I do think that ever since the 2023 shootings in Vermont, Brown students have been very active in regards to gun violence. I know Mia and myself have been involved in, you know, actions on campus in the past. But I think this is going to reinvigorate our fight to create a world where students like myself don’t have to worry about going through not one, but two school shootings.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you for being with us. Thank you for your bravery and speaking out right now. Zoe Weissman, Brown University sophomore, attended Westglades Middle School, adjacent to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when a former student opened fire in 2018 and killed 17 people, mainly students, now just back from Brown, where two students were killed in a mass shooting. Another eight are still in the hospital. A number of them are critically injured. The FBI has offered $50,000 for identifying the gunman, and new video has been put out. We want to thank you again for being with us, speaking to us from Parkland, Florida.
Up next, “’They’re trying to get rich off it’: US contractors vie to rebuild Gaza, with ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ team in the lead.” We’ll speak with investigative reporter Aram Roston. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We turn now to Gaza, where Israeli forces continue to block the entry of mobile homes and any shelter or construction materials that Israel says could be used to rebuild housing — or, that the Palestinians say could be used to rebuild, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by Israel’s relentless war. This marks the third consecutive winter that thousands of families in Gaza are forced to shelter in makeshift tents and sleep under fragile tarps, while others are living in the structures of buildings severely damaged by Israeli bombing over more than two years. Winter storms have compounded Gaza’s worsening humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s siege, with flash floods inundating tens of thousands of tents and collapsing damaged buildings where Palestinians attempted to shield themselves from the torrential rain. Al Jazeera reports at least a dozen Palestinians, including a baby, have been killed in collapsing buildings or have died from cold exposure.
MAHMOUD BASAL: [translated] A citizen’s alternative to leaving this building is the risk of a collapsed tent. A tent, without a doubt, cannot be safe for citizens. It cannot protect them from the cold, the winter, floods, stray dogs, rodents or diseases. Therefore, all the alternatives currently available to citizens in Gaza are dangerous and difficult.
AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as concerns mount for the future of Gaza’s rebuilding efforts, which the United Nations estimates will cost approximately $70 billion. For-profit construction, transportation, demolition and other companies with ties to the Trump administration and Republican allies are lining up to profit, vying for contracts that will likely be issued after President Trump’s so-called Board of Peace begins operations in Gaza.
This is at the heart of a new investigation published by The Guardian that’s titled “’They’re trying to get rich off it’: US contractors vie to rebuild Gaza, with ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ team in the lead.”
In a moment, we’ll be joined by the Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist Aram Roston, senior political enterprise reporter for The Guardian US, but we’re going to go to break first. Stay with us.
