For two Brown University students, school shooting was not their first

Among the dozens of fearful and worried students following Saturday’s shooting at Brown University, there were two who had been here before.

Mia Tretta, 21, was shot and killed following the 2019 mass shooting at Saugus High School, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles. A 16-year-old boy carried out the attack, killing two people, including Tretta’s best friend, and injuring three before shooting himself in the head.

Zoe Weissman, 20, was attending Westglades Middle School, adjacent to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when a former student opened fire on the school, killing 17 people in 2018.

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Neither Tretta nor Weissman expected another mass shooting.

“No one in this country assumes this is going to happen to them,” Tretta said. “Once it happens to you, you assume or are told that it will never happen again, and that’s obviously not the case.”

Saturday at Brown, an unidentified shooter killed two students and injured nine others before fleeing. He remains at large.

Weissman said she was in her dorm room when a friend called to tell her that students were running from a campus building and that a shooting was likely in progress.

She stayed put and said she had stayed in her dorm since she first heard the news.

“At first I was panicked,” Weissman, a second-year pre-med student, said in a telephone interview. “Once I knew a little more and no longer felt there was imminent danger, I felt numb – just like when I was 12.”

Tretta, a junior, said she chose Brown because she thought its smaller size would translate to greater security. But the trauma of her injury followed her to Brown even before Saturday’s attack. She said she couldn’t go into a campus library alone for fear of another shooting happening.

Both students have turned fear into anger and are speaking openly about gun violence.

Weissman became an activist calling for greater gun regulation. At age 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 because I thought I would never have to deal with this again, and here I am eight years later,” Weissman said.

Weissman said activism helped her heal and her experience brought attention to gun regulation.

“I think the fact that this is my second shoot can have a really big impact on 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 am never the same person as I was that day,” she said, “and I suspect it will be no different for students at Brown.”