‘It’s terrifying, but it’s not surprising’: a Brown University student on surviving her second school shooting | Brown University shooting

AAs federal and local authorities in Providence, Rhode Island, continue to search for the person who killed two Brown University students and injured nine others Saturday, members of the campus and the community at large are grieving and dealing with a shattered sense of security.

But for Mia Tretta, a 21-year-old student at Brown University, it’s familiar territory.

In 2019, as a 15-year-old high school student, she was shot in the abdomen during a mass shooting that left her close friend Dominic Blackwell and another student, Gracie Anne Muehlberger, dead. She and two other students were injured.

On Saturday, Tretta and her roommate were in their dorm room at Brown when they began receiving text messages about an active shooter in the university’s engineering building. At first, she wasn’t sure how seriously she should take the warnings. “I assumed the fire alarm goes off all the time and there’s no fire, but then we started getting hundreds of text messages,” Tretta said.

Then came a message from the university telling students to “run, hide, fight.” The school was closed until the next morning.

“It was terrifying, and it was terrifying for my friends who were there,” she said. “It’s terrible that this happened at Brown, but it’s not surprising at all. It’s happened all over the country and it’s only a matter of time before it happens to everyone.”

Since surviving the shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, Tretta, now 21, has embraced gun violence prevention activism, speaking at vigils and rallies. Four years ago, she spoke to the Guardian about the need for federal regulation of homemade firearms, known as ghost guns, one of which was used to shoot her in 2019.

“In my situation, we still don’t know who bought the gun. We know who used it, but we can’t trace it,” Tretta said in 2021. “I want people to use my story to show what happens when anyone can get a gun.”

Gunshot wounds are now the leading cause of death among adolescents in the United States, with black youth living in the country’s most underserved neighborhoods at greatest risk. While shootings and homicides have been steadily declining since the 2020-2021 peak, in 2025 there have been nearly 400 incidents so far in which four or more people, excluding the shooter, were struck by gunfire, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

“[Gun violence] “The current politicians that we have have the sole job of keeping us safe, and if we can’t go to the grocery store or walk to class without being afraid of getting shot, they’re not doing their job. I don’t know what it will take for people – especially politicians – to do something.”

Tretta is part of a small but growing cohort of young adults who have survived more than one mass shooting. Zoe Weissman, 20, a classmate of Brown’s who survived this weekend’s shooting, was 12 when she witnessed a shooting at the high school adjacent to her middle school in Parkland, Florida; this 2018 shooting left 17 dead.

At least two students who survived the 2021 mass shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan faced another school shooting years later at Michigan State University, where a gunman killed three students and injured five others in 2023.

Days before Brown’s shooting, Tretta was in Washington, D.C., where she performed a song at the national vigil for all victims of gun violence, organized by the Newtown Action Alliance, a nonprofit founded in the wake of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She remembers hearing from dozens of people, some who had lost loved ones to shootings and others, like her, who had been injured by gunfire.

The rally reminded him that shootings and violence do not discriminate.

“Unfortunately, gun violence doesn’t care if you’ve ever been shot, or if you’re at one of the most sophisticated Ivy League institutions or [in] the city center. Gun violence doesn’t care,” she said.