A Brown University junior couldn’t believe her eyes when she experienced a shooting incident on campus last Saturday, December 13th. This was the second campus shooting she had encountered in her life. Back in high school, she was shot in the abdomen during a shooting incident, and now, in college, she faced another one.
According to ABC News, Mia Tretta, a junior at Brown University, was studying for her final exams when her phone suddenly blared with an emergency alert. She tried to convince herself that another campus shooting couldn’t possibly 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 in that incident, while Tretta and two others were injured. She was only 15 years old at the time.
Last Saturday, while studying in her dorm room, Tretta received the first alert warning of an emergency situation at the university’s engineering building. She prayed fervently that it wasn’t another campus shooting. However, she later learned that the shooting incident at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, resulted in 2 fatalities and 9 injuries.
“No one should have to experience a shooting, let alone two,” Tretta told ABC News. “I was shot in high school at the age of 15, and I never thought I would have to go through something like this again.”
Tretta’s experiences reflect the harsh reality faced by college students today: they have been practicing lockdowns and active shooter drills since childhood, only to find themselves in the midst of such tragedies years later.
The coincidence of Tretta experiencing two shooting incidents is not isolated. Survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida in 2018 also encountered a fatal shooting incident at a state university in April of this year. Another Brown University student recalled hearing gunshots while studying in middle school on social media.