BALTIMORE — Teo Miranda-Moreno, a Brown University freshman and Mt. Hebron High School alum, was studying and stressing about final exams Saturday when gunfire broke out a short walk away on the Rhode Island campus.

Another mass shooting was underway — one that ultimately claimed the lives of two Brown students and injured nine others. Miranda-Moreno later learned one of the dead was his friend Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov. The shooter remains at large.

The Ellicott City teen spoke to The Baltimore Sun on Thursday about what he experienced that day.

Miranda-Moreno said his phone began “blowing up” shortly after 4 p.m. Before any official alerts from Brown, anonymous messages on the app Sidechat — which he said is commonly used on campus — warned students to stay away from the engineering building, where the shooting occurred, and a nearby science library. Brown issued an official alert at 4:22 p.m.

Some students in the library initially thought the reports were a joke. It soon became clear they were not.

“My library went into like, full lockdown,” said Miranda-Moreno, 18. “Students really initiated locking down the library,” as staff were mostly concentrated on the main floor, he said. “We started barricading … the doors with chairs.”

Library staff on the building’s lower floor directed students to stay away from windows, Miranda-Moreno said. He moved to the second level of the library’s basement, where he and about 25 other students hid among the stacks for roughly seven hours, until 11 p.m.

“It was very silent,” Miranda-Moreno said. “Almost everyone was either enclosed on their phone or whispering to one friend next to them.” Between texting friends and family, there were “long moments where I would just put my phone down because it truly was too much,” he said.

“We didn’t really have a sense of when the active shooting was … finished,” he said.

The group eventually learned through Sidechat that police had arrived at the library. About an hour later, authorities reached their floor and escorted them to the main level. Students then boarded buses to the school’s indoor track stadium, where they were either released to parents or dismissed to dorms, Miranda-Moreno said.

“I felt really afraid to go back to my dorm hall,” he said. He posed as a friend’s adopted sibling so he could spend the night at her house. “I felt insecure on campus. It was maybe even … less about, like, a fear that a second shooting might happen again. But I was just feeling very emotional, and I felt like I couldn’t possibly have … a good night’s rest, like back in my dorm with everything that had happened.”

‘Friends with everyone’

Miranda-Moreno said he did not learn of Umurzokov’s death until hours later.

“We were all reaching out to him, and he wasn’t responding to any of his messages,” he said. “We spent a very long time grieving. I know I broke down. I was very sad because he was only 17.”

“We had great conversations, we had great times together,” Miranda-Moreno said of Umurzokov, whom he described as “a really noble guy” who was “friends with everyone.”

Umurzokov was in a classroom hosting a finals study session for Principals of Economics, a class he wasn’t in, Miranda-Moreno said. “He went to the Principals of Econ classroom because his friends were in the class and they invited him. And because he’s just such a great person, he went, but he wasn’t meant to be there.”

Umurzokov was a dual citizen of Uzbekistan who attended high school in Chesterfield County, Virginia, and aspired to become a neurosurgeon, Brown University President Christina H. Paxson wrote in a message to faculty, staff and students eulogizing him and sophomore Ella Cook, who was also killed.

The Umurzokov family’s GoFundMe has raised more than $500,000, some of which Miranda-Moreno said he contributed.

Gun violence on campus

As of Saturday, there had been at least 75 school shootings nationwide in 2025, according to CNN. The Brown shooting was Rhode Island’s first school shooting since 2008, CNN reported.

Miranda-Moreno said that while gun violence had previously hit close to home, including the Columbia mall shooting that killed two teens in 2024, this was the first time he had been directly affected. As the shooting made headlines across the country, the freshman said he isn’t interested in the thoughts and prayers being sent online to Brown.

“Those thoughts and prayers don’t mean much unless actual … action is being taken,” he said. “The only way action can be taken is by increasing gun control.”

Miranda-Moreno said he worries that the shooter has not been caught. “That’s going to be nagging in the minds of many for a long time.”

He said he was “happy to leave” campus to return to Maryland but anticipates being happy to be back on campus in late January.

“I chose Brown because it’s always known to have a very … welcoming environment, and it has a great applied math and econ[omics] department,” he said. “And overall, it was a school that seemed to be the best fit for me, and continues to be.”

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