Brown University Student Faces Trauma Again After Campus Shooting

Brown University junior Mia Tretta confronted a familiar nightmare when her phone vibrated with emergency alerts during finals week. The notifications warned of a shooting incident on campus, echoing a traumatic experience she had endured years earlier. In 2019, Tretta was shot in the abdomen during a mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, where two students lost their lives and several others, including her, were injured.

On Saturday, Tretta was studying in her dorm with a friend when the first alert came in, indicating an emergency at the university’s engineering building. Despite her instinct to hope for the best, the urgency of the alerts soon confirmed her worst fears. By the end of the day, two individuals were dead, and nine others were injured in a shooting in Providence, Rhode Island, transforming a place of learning into a scene of violence once more.

Resilience Amid Repeated Trauma

Tretta expressed her anguish in a phone interview, stating, “No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two. As someone who was shot at my high school when I was 15 years old, I never thought that this was something I’d have to go through again.” Her experience is part of a troubling trend affecting students today, who have grown up with active shooter drills and lockdown procedures only to face real violence on campuses that once offered a sense of safety.

In recent years, some students have survived multiple mass shootings at different educational stages. Survivors of the 2018 tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have also faced gun violence at other institutions, such as Florida State University. Another Brown University student, Zoe Weissman, shared her reflections on social media about attending middle school next door to the Parkland high school during the massacre.

Adding to the community’s distress, Craig Greenberg, the Mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, confirmed that his son, Ben, a junior at Brown, was safe after barricading himself in his room with furniture. Greenberg himself survived an assassination attempt during his mayoral campaign in 2022.

Advocacy for Change

Following her injury in high school, Tretta became an advocate for stricter gun control laws and even visited the White House during former President Joe Biden‘s administration. She spoke with former Attorney General Merrick Garland about the dangers of “ghost guns,” firearms that can be assembled from parts and are hard to trace.

At Brown, Tretta was also working on a paper about the educational journeys of students who have experienced school shootings, a project deeply influenced by her own ordeal. “I chose Brown, a place that I love, because it felt like somewhere I could finally be safe and finally, you know, be normal in this new normal that I live of a school shooting survivor,” she remarked. “And it’s happened again. And it didn’t have to.”

The alarming frequency of such incidents raises significant questions about safety in educational environments and the psychological toll on students who have already faced unimaginable trauma. Tretta’s story highlights the urgent need for systemic change to prevent further violence and protect future generations of students.