Amid the scores of fearful and worried students following Saturday’s shooting at Brown University were two who have been here before.
Mia Tretta, 21, was shot following the 2019 mass shooting at Saugus High School, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles. A 16-year-old boy carried out that attack, killing two, including Tretta’s best friend, and injuring three before fatally shooting himself.
Zoe Weissman, 20, attended Westglades Middle School, adjacent to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when a former student opened fire at the latter, killing 17 in 2018.
Neither Tretta nor Weissman expected to experience a mass shooting again.
“No one in this country even assumes it’s going to happen to them,” Tretta said. “Once it happens to you, you assume or are told it will never happen again, and obviously that is not the case.”
At Brown on Saturday, an unidentified gunman killed two students and injured another nine before fleeing. He remains at large.
Weissman said she was at her dorm when a friend called to say students were running away from a campus building and a shooting was likely underway.
She stayed put and said she has remained at her dorm room since she first heard the news.
“At first, I was panicked,” Weissman, a sophomore pre-med student, said in a phone interview. “Once I knew a little more and I didn’t feel there was imminent danger, I felt numb — exactly how I did when I was 12.”
Tretta, a junior, said she chose Brown because she believed its smaller size would translate to greater safety. But the trauma of her injury followed her to Brown even before Saturday’s attack. She said she can’t enter a library on campus alone for fear that another shooting could happen.
Both students have turned fear into anger and are outspoken about gun violence.
Weissman has become an activist calling for greater gun regulation. When she was 16, she was president of March for Our Lives in Parkland, a chapter of the group co-founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg.
“I’m angry that I thought I’d never have to deal with this again, and here I am eight years later,” Weissman said.
Weissman said the activism helps her heal, and her experience draws attention to gun regulation.
“I think the fact this is my second shooting can be very impactful for people,” she said. “When people put a face to something, they care a lot more.”
Tretta said the day she was shot in 2019 changed her life forever.
“I have not been the same person I was that day ever again,” she said, “and I assume it won’t be any different for the students at Brown.”