He was a first-year university student, a class president, a stock trader, a lacrosse player, and a young man who used his school holidays to carry supplies to abandoned children in Kampala. His family’s final request says everything about who he was.
Timothy Muganzi Magambo was 18 years old. He had just finished his first year at the University at Albany, studying Business Management and Finance. He played lacrosse, soccer, and football. He traded stocks for fun. He served as class president, school-wide treasurer, and senator-at-large at Pelham Memorial High School. He was a member of the National Honor Society and co-vice president of the Breast Cancer Awareness Club.
And every school holiday, he flew back to Uganda and went to Sanyu Babies’ Home.
Not because anyone asked him to. Because he wanted to.
Timothy passed away on May 16, 2026, in Pelham Manor, New York. He was born on September 24, 2007 in Kampala — the son of Uganda’s Criminal Investigations Directorate Director, Tom Magambo, and Caroline Nalwanga. He was 18 years old. He had barely started.
When a family loses a child, the funeral request tells you who that child really was. The Magambo family did not ask for flowers. They asked mourners to make memorial donations to Sanyu Babies’ Home in Uganda — the Kampala institution that cares for abandoned, orphaned, and vulnerable babies and young children.
That request was not symbolic. It was biographical.
Family members say Timothy regularly travelled back to Uganda during school holidays and participated in charitable activities, often carrying school supplies, clothing, and other necessities for disadvantaged and abandoned children. Sanyu Babies’ Home was not a cause he had been assigned. It was somewhere he chose to spend his time, with his own hands, during the holidays that most teenagers his age spend resting or travelling.
“He genuinely cared about people,” a family friend shared. “Supporting children in need was something very close to his heart, which is why the family felt donations to Sanyu Babies’ Home would best honor his legacy.”
Timothy spent his early childhood in Uganda and Rwanda before his family relocated to the United States when he was seven. He attended Colonial Elementary School and went on to Pelham Memorial High School in New York, where he built a life that somehow held together two very different worlds — and never let go of either.
In New York, he was an athlete, a student leader, an academic achiever. In Kampala, he was a young man who showed up at a babies’ home with supplies and a willingness to help. Friends describe him as warm, thoughtful, and remarkably mature — someone who enjoyed music, gaming, and stock trading, but whose deepest instinct was always toward others.
“He genuinely cared about people” is the kind of thing people say at funerals. When the family’s final public request is a donation to an orphanage in Kampala, it stops being a funeral line and becomes a fact.
Funeral services are scheduled to take place in Pelham, New York this week. His passing has drawn an outpouring of grief from friends, classmates, members of the Ugandan community in the diaspora, and leaders back home.
The Magambo family has requested that memorial donations be directed to Sanyu Babies’ Home, Kampala, Uganda — the institution Timothy spent his holidays serving.
It is the most Timothy Magambo thing anyone could do.
