Friends and co-workers remembered an investigative journalist who died in a horrific Harlem apartment fire as a humble, patient reporter who was adept at teaching others how to use data in their own work.
Fazil Khan, 27, worked through his cultural and personal unease with talking to people suffering grief to share the stories of New York children who lost parents to the COVID pandemic, said Kristen Lombardi, the editor and director of the postgraduate Columbia Journalism Investigations program.
“He had such generosity of spirit that people who were reluctant to talk, distrustful of reporters, immediately all that stuff went away when they were with Fazil,” she told the Daily News. “He was just such a quiet, generous person.”
Khan, who started his journalism career as a copy editor at one of India’s leading business dailies in 2018, moved from Delhi to New York in 2020 to attend Columbia Journalism School.
He graduated in 2021 and became a fellow in the Columbia Journalism Investigations program, and was working as a data journalist at The Hechinger Report, a website focused on education issues.
“This is a devastating loss. Fazil was the type of colleague everyone hopes to have – kind, smart, helpful, caring and just so lovely and genuine,” co-worker Jackie Mader wrote on X.
Khan died Friday in a dramatic Friday blaze at 2 St. Nicholas Place that FDNY officials say was sparked by an e-bike battery. The fire broke out in a third-floor apartment in the six-story building, and firefighters found three tenants unconscious on the upper floors.
Several others scrambled to escape the flames, leading firefighters to set up ropes on the roof and perform daring rescues along the side of the burning building. In all, 17 other people were injured, five critically.
“(Khan) was a rising star,” Lombardi said. “I always felt like when he left the program, I was going to see him do something great. And all of that was kind of snuffed out.”
In an in-depth COVID story published in January 2023 in The City and City Limits, Khan and a colleague focused on the lack of school grief-counseling resources available to the 8,700 city children who lost a parent or caregiver to the virus, highlighting the disproportionate effects on minority communities.
Khan spoke to one of the families at the heart of the story, a mother and three children who lost their dad to the pandemic.
“He was very conscientious. He was very concerned about making sure he checked back in with (the mother) and telling her about the development of the story with her every step of the way,” Lombardi said. “He was just a quiet, humble, generous person.”
Khan most recently reported on how poor students at several colleges pay more for out-of-pocket school costs than their richer classmates.
This past October, he co-created a data tool called “The College Welcome Guide,” giving prospective students easily-searchable access to information about more than 4,000 colleges or universities.
The info includes data on enrollment demographics, Pell Grant recipients, graduation rates and state laws concerning diversity and LGBTQ+ policies.
“Fazil was an extraordinary journalist, a compassionate and thoughtful friend, a poet, a gym enthusiast, a competitive card game player, and at once the kindest and most sarcastic person I’ve ever known,” Paroma Soni, one of Khan’s friends from Columbia, said in written remarks about him. “I can’t imagine life in New York without his grounding presence.”
Khan was planning to host two panels at the upcoming NICAR 2024 data journalism conference in Baltimore next month.
Lombardi described Khan as devoted to helping his co-workers understand data, someone who would set aside time to teach them about methodologies or check their math and demonstrate “the power of numbers.”
“Fazil was an ambitious and talented data journalist and one of the sweetest friends I’ve ever had. This is a loss not just for his close friends and family but for the journalism community as a whole,” Bianca Pallaro, a friend and his NICAR panel co-host, said in written remarks about him.
Khan is survived by five siblings in India, as well as his mother and grandmother.
The fatal blaze took place just across the street from the infamous 2018 “Motherless Brooklyn” fire that killed Firefighter Michael Davidson.
Friday’s fire was also the latest in a long string of deadly e-bike battery blazes that have been plaguing the city. Eighteen people died in e-bike battery fires in 2023 — contributing to a push by Mayor Adams for a new city agency to regulate the food and package delivery business.
