The Nerd Store Rallies Against Hate

Valley Fair Mall has been home to The Nerd Store for nearly 14 years, and for owner Roger Prows, it has always represented something more than a place to do business. Following the hate-motivated stabbing of mall employee Syed Sohail Uddin on July 13th, Prows and The Nerd Store have pledged to match donations to Uddin’s verified GoFundMe — dollar for dollar — up to $200,000, in hopes of easing the financial burden on Uddin and his family while sending a message that hatred will not define their community.

“It was a shock,” Prows says. “One of the most frustrating things for me has been seeing all the people online that are uneducated and have big opinions. They want to act like this is the norm out here, and it’s so not. It was absolutely shocking.” The fundraiser was organized after Uddin — a husband, father of two and Valley Fair Mall employee — suffered more than 15 stab wounds in what police say was a targeted, anti-Muslim hate crime. He has undergone multiple surgeries to his hands, heart and lungs, with no health insurance and facing a lengthy recovery. Prows wasn’t at the mall when the attack occurred, but his daughter was working at The Nerd Store. “She called me and said somebody had come into the store, grabbed their kid and ran out, saying someone had been stabbed,” Prows recalls. “She went out and saw blood everywhere. When they took him out, she thought it was a body. We were operating under the impression that someone had died.”

As details emerged and Prows learned that Uddin had survived, relief quickly gave way to a desire to help. “I got on the phone with my brother, who’s my business partner, and we just started saying, ‘We should figure out something we can do,'” Prows says. “Given the time and resources we had available, a donation match was probably the best and most efficient thing we could manage.” Before making the announcement, Prows wanted to ensure every dollar would go to the right place. “I went to the mall and talked to the security people who were there that day — they’re fantastic human beings — and told them what we wanted to do,” Prows says. “They put me in touch with the owner of the business where Sohail worked, who connected me with the family and gave me the official GoFundMe. I wanted to make sure we were sharing the legitimate fundraiser because unfortunately copycats happen.”

Rather than routing its matching contribution through GoFundMe, The Nerd Store plans to present its matching funds directly to the family. “We’re just going to write a check and bring it directly to them so it doesn’t have any of those GoFundMe fees associated with it,” Prows explains. “We even talked about becoming a donation center ourselves, but we didn’t have time to build the systems to track everything properly. We knew this was urgent.”

For Prows, the attack also underscored why Valley Fair has always mattered to him. The Nerd Store opened its first location there nearly 14 years ago after mall ownership invited the business to become part of an effort to revitalize the area. “They’ve treated us like partners from the very beginning,” Prows says. “They’ve let us host free comic conventions and community events. It was absolutely the right decision.” Prows believes the mall’s diversity is one of its greatest strengths — and one reason he fears it may have been deliberately targeted. “It seems to me that he intentionally chose a place with diversity and minorities,” Prows says, stressing that this is his personal opinion. “He knew he could find somebody who fit the profile he was looking for.”

Instead of allowing that violence to divide people, Prows hopes the fundraiser will encourage the opposite. “It’s one thing to condemn these kinds of attacks,” Prows says. “It’s another thing to work against them. A lot of the businesses in this mall are locally owned, and many are minority-owned. If we allow people like this to scare us away from places where minorities are, then we’re helping create the environment they’re trying to create.

For Prows, matching up to $200,000 in donations is about far more than raising money. It’s a way to show that, in the face of hatred, the Valley Fair community chooses solidarity. —Patrick Gibbs

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