During finals week, Brown University junior Mia Tretta’s phone lit up with an emergency alert. She hoped it was just a glitch—until the notification warned of danger in the engineering building.
In 2019, while she was only 15, Tretta was shot in the abdomen during a mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. Two students died and she, along with two classmates, were wounded.
The messages that followed forced Tretta to confront what she had feared: “Something must have happened, she thought, but surely it couldn’t be a shooting.” As the alerts intensified and urged students to lock down and stay away from windows, the pattern became unmistakable.
By the day’s end, the Providence campus was again shrouded in grief. Two people had lost their lives and nine others were injured in the shooting that ripped through the university’s engineering building.
“No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two,” Tretta told the police after the incident. “And as someone who was shot at my high school when I was 15 years old, I never thought that this was something I’d have to go through again.”
Her experience reflects a harsh reality for many college students today: the drills and lockdowns they practiced in high school are now the same scenes they face on campus. Several survivors of the 2018 Parkland tragedy and the 2021 FSU shooting have returned to their campuses to face another round of violence.
One Brown student, Zoe Weissman, reflected on the 2018 Parkland shooting while speaking on social media. She shared that she was outside the neighboring middle school when the guns fired. “I heard the shots and the screams, saw first responders, and then watched videos of what happened.”
Ben Greenberg, the son of Louisville’s mayor, had a similar frightening past when, in 2022, a police officer escorted him from a class after a shooting at his high‑school. He later moved to Providence to study at Brown, hoping for a calmer life. Living just across from the building where the recent shooting occurred, he and roommates set up a makeshift barrier with a mini‑fridge, a bookcase and bottles to alert them if someone knocked it over.
The family was still in shock the night after. Greenberg’s father, Mayor Craig Greenberg, described how the earlier assassination attempt had reshaped the family’s sense of security. “The impact of gun violence goes far beyond the individuals who are wounded or killed by bullets, to families, friends, entire communities. Those impacts are real, they’re not physical wounds, but they are traumatic wounds,” he said.
After her own ordeal at Saugus, Tretta became a vocal advocate for gun reform. She led students demanding action, met with former President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, and has focused on curbing the rising use of ghost guns—firearms that can be built from parts and are hard to trace.
At Brown, she had been working on a research paper exploring the journeys of students who survived school shootings. The paper, due shortly, was a reflection of her personal story.
Tretta, who majors in International and Public Affairs and Education, said Saturday was the first time she’d received an active‑shooter alert while at Brown. “I chose Brown, a place that I love, because it felt like somewhere I could finally be safe and finally, you know, be normal in this new normal that I live of a school shooting survivor,” she said. “And it’s happened again. And it didn’t have to.”
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