Sabika Sheikh: How a Pakistani Exchange Student Lost Her Life to Gun Violence

In 2017, a 17-year-old exchange student — Sabika Sheikh — from Pakistan landed in Texas for the American high school experience.

Nine months later, on the morning of May 18, 2018, she posted a picture of an airplane on her social media, captioned ‘How many days until June 5? Its 19 days’. She was scheduled to return home 19 days later, with countless stories from the time she spent in your country.

That same day, she was shot dead.

She was murdered with nine people inside her art class at Santa Fe High School, thousands of miles away from her home and her people.

I am her cousin.

I was a Fulbright exchange scholar in America then and returned with Sabika’s body to Pakistan. When I came back one last time for my final graduate year, my only purpose was to get a gun safety bill introduced in her name in the United States Congress.

In 2019, right before my final departure from your country, I stood inside the U.S. Capitol as that bill was introduced.

HR 127, the Sabika Sheikh Firearm Licensing and Registration Act, prescribes a comprehensive licensing system for gun and ammunition ownership. It requires that a person must be at least 21 years old and undergo a criminal background check, psychological evaluation, and elaborate training on the safe use and storage of guns in order to be licensed to own a firearm. It also prohibits the sale of certain large-capacity ammunition devices.

Looking back to that moment inside the Capitol, I laugh at my naiveté. I believed that your legislators would immediately come together to decisively reduce gun violence. It now baffles me how a choice — between living and getting murdered, and between the freedom to feel safe and the chilling horror of hearing the first gunshot at your school — can be so polarizing in your country.

When a school was attacked by the Taliban in Pakistan on December 16, 2014, my country came together. This included the public, civil society, and politicians across party lines. Our consensus as a society was unanimous: Protecting kids at a place as sacred as school was not up for debate.

I’ve seen legislators in your country fail this test of conscience again and again. Do they not realize that once someone you grew up with is massacred so mercilessly nothing can be restored?

I was the family member who went to Texas to receive Sabika’s body and take it back to Pakistan. Every single emotion I felt during those moments at the morgue when I looked at her cold body will forever be a haunting reminder of her brutal murder in your country. Do U.S. politicians not know that the memory of that horrifying moment never becomes distant? That it never leaves? That it stares at you with its hollow eyes, carrying nothing but gloom and fear? Are they so incapable of feeling that they can’t understand the overpowering melancholy I feel every time I text Sabika and wait with a delusional hope that she will reply?

Even today, four years after her murder, I feel that I left Sabika in your country all alone. She is in every abandoned street and every deserted lane of Texas. Her lifeless body is still inside that barren art class. She sees every mass shooting unfold in front of her eyes. And she is still waiting for some semblance of justice.

Every memory I have of your country is scarred forever. Every mention of the United States serves as a gut-wrenching reminder of Sabika’s last moments — of her awareness that she was about to be killed, of the helpless desperation of wanting to survive, and of the final realization that she will not.

My cousin was brutally murdered in a country where she came to exchange peace and lasting friendship. The shocking inaction of your politicians, despite decades of gun violence, failed her. Do not let this inaction fail your children.

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