When Brown University junior Mia Tretta’s phone started buzzing with emergency alerts during finals week, she tried to convince herself it wouldn’t happen again.
In 2019, Tretta was shot in the abdomen during a mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. Two students died and she and two others were injured. She was 15 years old at the time.
Treta was studying in her dormitory with friends on Saturday when she received the first message warning of an emergency in the university’s engineering building. Something must have happened, she thought, but it certainly couldn’t have been a shooting.
As more alerts poured in, urging people to lock their doors and stay away from windows, the familiar language made clear what she feared. By the end of the day, two people were dead and nine others were injured in another school shooting in Providence, Rhode Island.
“No one should have to go through one shooting, let alone two,” Tretta said in a phone interview Sunday. “As someone who was shot in high school when I was 15 years old, I never thought I would experience this again.”
Tretta’s experience captures the stark reality of a generation in college right now: students who have grown up rehearsing lockdowns and active-shooter drills only to be exposed to the same violence again years later on campuses that once seemed to escape violence.
A small group of students have experienced multiple mass shootings at various points in their education in recent years, including survivors of the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who later experienced a fatal shooting at Florida State University in April.
Another Brown student, Zoe Weissman, took to social media to recall attending the middle school next door to Parkland High School during the Parkland High School massacre. She said she was outside the middle school when the shooting occurred, heard gunshots and screams, saw first responders and then watched video of the incident.
Louisville, Kentucky, Mayor Craig Greenberg said on Facebook that his son, Ben, a junior at Brown University, was safe after barricading himself and his roommate in a room with furniture. Greenberg survived an assassination attempt during his 2022 campaign for mayor.
After Tretta was shot and killed in high school, she advocated for tighter gun restrictions and won the White House under former President Joe Biden, where she also met with his former attorney general, Merrick Garland.
She’s particularly concerned about “ghost guns,” like the one used in her high school, which can be assembled from parts, making it difficult to track or police the owner.
At Brown University, Tretta has been writing a thesis on the educational journey of students who have experienced a school shooting, a topic shaped by her own experiences. The paper is due in a few days.
Tretta, who studies international, public affairs and education, said Saturday was the first time she had received such an active active shooter alert at Brown.
“I chose Brown, a place that I love, because it was a place where I felt like I could finally be safe and finally, you know, be normal in the new normal that I was living as a school shooting survivor,” she said. “It happened again. And it didn’t have to be.”