Mucaad Ibrahim was wearing little white socks, the type with grippy stripes on the bottom so that toddlers don’t slip, when he was carried out of the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch.
His shoes were still at the entrance, where he’d left them when he arrived for Friday prayers with his father and older brother. His big brown eyes, usually alight with laughter, were closed as he was rushed to the ambulance.
That was the last time his family saw him.
Mucaad, whose name is pronounced “Mou’ad” but who was more commonly called by the Arabic diminutive “Mou’adee”, born in New Zealand to a Somali family who had fled fighting in their home country more than 20 years ago.
Mucaad was “energetic, playful and liked to smile and laugh a lot”, his teenage brother Abdi Ibrahim wrote on Facebook. “Will miss you dearly brother.”
He was the youngest of the 50 victims in the attacks.
“He could have grown up to be a brilliant doctor or the prime minister,” said Mohamud Hassan, a 21-year-old member of the Christchurch Somali community, which comprises about 60 families.
He shook his head, an expression of the common refrain after all mass shootings: “Why?”
Mucaad’s father, Adan Ibrahim, had collected him at around noon on Friday to take him to Friday prayers as usual.
After prayers, the young men often went to play football in Hagley Park across the road, and Mucaad often went with Abdi to watch.
Source: New Zealand Herald
