In Santa Fe, Pakistani family retraces daughter’s last days
Relatives of exchange student slain in school shooting travel across globe to seek answers, but details remain elusive
SANTA FE — The first thing Sabika Sheikh’s parents saw when they entered the main room at the Santa Fe Strong Resiliency Center were several large white canvas sheets forming a square in the center of the room. “God Bless Santa Fe” was emblazoned above dozens of messages scrawled in marker: “We miss you,” “Santa Fe Strong,” “Never forget.”
The center opened its doors for the first time last week to Abdul Aziz Sheikh and Farah Naz. Their daughter Sabika, an exchange student, was one of the 10 people killed during a shooting at Santa Fe High School in May 2018.
Making their way slowly through the main room, the couple, their three children and a niece paused at each canvas to read the messages, well-wishes and blessings, each a tribute from the community to their daughter. Abdul scanned the canvas stoically, his arms folded behind his back. Naz gently wiped tears from her cheek.
The center, an extension of the Aldersgate United Methodist Church, was established in the wake of the shooting, serving as a healing environment for a grieving community.
It was the first time Sabika Sheikh’s parents and siblings had set foot on American soil since the tragedy that took the life of their 17-year old daughter. They intended the trip to ease the grief over losing their eldest child, but also to celebrate Sabika — to shatter, or perhaps to confirm, any perception they had about her nine months as an exchange student in this rural town, worlds away from their home city of Karachi, Pakistan.
In an interview at their hotel in Stafford the day after the visit to the resiliency center, Sabika’s mother said the family wanted to to meet with Sabika’s host family, to meet her friends, to walk in Sabika’s footsteps through the halls of the high school.
“We don’t want the perception to be that we just sent Sabika here, that she was taken away (from us) and now we’ve decided to stay back and have nothing to do with it,” Naz said in Urdu as her niece interpreted.
Sabika came to Santa Fe High School in August 2017 as a youth ambassador with the State Department-sponsored Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study program, which provides scholarships for secondary school students from countries with significant Muslim populations to spend one academic year in the United States.
Like any parent sending a child to a foreign country, Naz worried for her daughter. She had heard that Santa Fe was a politically conservative town and was concerned that Sabika would stand out as a Muslim girl with brown skin.
Sabika’s cousin Shaheera Jalil Albasit said friends later told Sabika’s parents that the exchange student had decided not to tell her family about any bullying.
“That’s something that she was thinking about and maybe she experienced things that she did not tell them,” Albasit said.
If there were instances of bullying, they did not hamper Sabika’s studies. She excelled academically and threw herself into the American teenage lifestyle, volunteering at the local library, dressing up as a pirate for Halloween, keeping score at baseball games and attending prom.
Sabika chose to share these positive experiences with her family, though there were still moments that raised alarm in Karachi.
On Feb. 28, the high school was placed on lockdown after a report of popping sounds was initially feared to be a possible shooting on campus . Police found no threat after conducting a sweep.
Sabika did not attend school that day, but sent a photo of her classmates on lockdown to her sister, Sania, saying she was glad she wasn’t there when it happened.
The episode, mere weeks after a high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., stuck with Sabika’s father. A distributor of cosmetics and plastic products in Pakistan, he had spent a month in the Houston area in 2015 on business and came away with a positive impression.
But he acknowledges that one month is hardly enough time to grasp the pervasiveness of gun culture in Texas.
“Before (the Santa Fe shooting) happened, I did not know the actual extent of the gun culture, not just the violence, but the amount of guns they have and the way they wear them on their sleeve,” Sheikh said.
When the family toured the empty high school on Tuesday during summer break, they visited the art classroom where Sabika and seven of her classmates and two teachers were killed. The accused gunman, a senior at the high school, opened fire on a storage closet where Sabika hid with other students, killing her.
Sabika’s family, like many relatives of the Santa Fe victims, is still seeking answers about the events that day. But details remain elusive nearly 14 months later.
The family met with representatives of the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s office and the Galveston County district attorney and visited the high school, where they met the principal. None of these discussions, however, yielded the information they sought, including whether Sabika was targeted because of her ethnicity or Muslim faith.
At least some of their questions will likely be answered during the trial of the suspect, who has been charged with capital murder with a trial set for Feb. 18 in Richmond.
Sabika’s father said he plans to return to Texas at the conclusion of the trial when, as a family member of a victim, he may have the opportunity to address the accused shooter directly.
“I want to meet him,” Sheikh said. “I just want to be face to face with him and ask, ‘Why?’ ”
But they are dissatisfied at the limited information released about the shooting and at the lack of a full public accounting like the response to the Parkland shooting.
The parents also question whether the high school administration made any significant changes in the wake of the Feb. 28 scare that could have prevented the shooting months later.
And while the family received an outpouring of support after the shooting — people from all over “the whole world” reached out, Sheikh said — they never received any correspondence from the school district administration.
“Not a single letter of condolence,” Naz said.
A spokeswoman for the Santa Fe Independent School District said in a statement that the district regrets “not having the opportunity to connect with Sabika Sheikh’s family directly to express our condolences until their recent visit to Santa Fe.”
The Sheikh family joined a civil lawsuit against the accused shooter’s parents, alleging that they knew their son was experiencing extreme behavioral red flags but failed to prevent him from accessing their firearms, which authorities believe were used in the shooting.
Sabika’s parents said their primary goal in joining the lawsuit was to raise awareness about the epidemic of gun violence in the United States.
“Sabika wanted to have a positive impact on the world and her parents are doing everything they can to keep that dream alive,” said Alla Lefkowitz, an attorney for Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun violence prevention organization, who is representing the family in the civil suit. “They wanted to make a difference and they joined the lawsuit because they don’t want another family to go through what they went through.”
The family feels strongly that arming teachers and fortifying school buildings fail to fix the roots of gun violence. Sheikh said guns should be made less accessible.
Albasit, Sabika’s cousin, said gun violence is not a systemic issue in Karachi, the most populous city in Pakistan at nearly 15 million people.
“You won’t gift your kids guns on their 18th birthday, you won’t see people walking around wearing guns,” Albasit said. “(Guns are) with law enforcement, more or less.”
But Albasit, who is finishing a master’s program at George Washington University, said that even with her family reeling with grief over losing Sabika, they are not cowed by fear.
The Arabic word inshallah expresses the belief that nothing happens unless God wills it. Albasit said this philosophy steels families against random acts of violence at home or abroad.
And for the family, while the pain of losing their daughter in a foreign country will never fully subside, meeting Sabika’s friends in Santa Fe, breaking bread with her host family and engaging with a community that shares their grief has comforted them.
“She was just being herself and also identifying herself,” Albasit said. “Growing to know herself as a better person. And they know that there are good people in this country as well. That’s an important takeaway.”