Wheeler HS graduate safely flees deadly Brown U shooting

A Wheeler High School graduate safely evacuated the Brown University campus last weekend during a mass shooting that killed two people, both of whom he knew.

Edward Kim, a freshman engineering major at Brown, said in a cable television interview that he got a message from his mother on Saturday afternoon after the shooting on the Ivy League campus in Providence, R.I.

“We felt that the right decision was to leave immediately,” Kim said in an interview with Katy Tur on MS NOW (formerly MSNBC; you can watch the full interview here.)

He was speaking from his home in Marietta, after Brown officials cancelled the rest of the semester and final exams.

Five days later, law enforcement across New England continues searching for the suspect, who is wanted for shooting to death Ella Cook, 19, of Mountain Brook, Ala., and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an Uzbeki national who attended high school in Midlothian, Va.

Nine other people were shot, with one having been released, one in critical condition and seven others in stable condition.

One of the victims is another Georgia student, Jacob Spears, 18, from Columbia County, who is recoverimg in a hospital.

Authorities in Providence have released footage of the man they say is the suspect, but he has not been identified, and they’re asking for the public’s help in locating him.

Kim attended the Wheeler STEM Magnet school and graduated in May. As a junior, he took part in a student walkout at Wheeler following a deadly shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder.

At Brown, he was friends with Umurzokov, who was aspiring to be a brain surgeon.

Tur asked Kim if he would be reluctant to return to campus if the shooter was still at-large after the holidays: “Absolutely.”

He said a few days before the shooting there was a false alarm that he said students took seriously.

“The fact that we don’t have anybody in custody has brought a lot of fear into Brown students,” Kim said.

Kim said that he thought Umurzokov was from the Atlanta area because he mentioned to him specific MARTA stations, and that he helped him deal with some homesickness by talking about the Georgia Bulldogs.

“I still can’t believe he’s not going to be with us in January when we come back,” Kim said of Umurzokov.

Kim said in the MS NOW interview that he also had an interaction with Cook in August regarding joining a political e-mail list (she was involved with the Brown College Republican group), although he didn’t know her name at the time.

Kim, who supported Democrat Laura Judge in a Cobb Board of Education election in 2024 in Post 5 in East Cobb, also was a youth advisor for U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick, a Georgia Republican, in 2023.

During the Wheeler walkout in September 2024, Kim spoke to the assembled students, saying that “in major moments of national social change, students coming together and speaking about their challenges pushed the needle. Could you imagine how behind Civil Rights would be without the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference? What about the Vietnam War? The movements were fought on college campuses, not the halls of Congress, not the Oval Office.”

On a social media posting, Judge—who’s involved with the gun-control group Moms Demand Action—said Wednesday morning that she had kept in touch with Kim as he started college, and that the tragedy at Brown “just galvanizes me to continue to enact change.