Surviving It Twice: When a Campus Shooting Reopens Old Wounds at Brown University
As gunshots rang out across Brown University during final exams, fear spread quickly through classrooms, dorm rooms, and libraries. Students were seen hiding under desks, phones buzzing with emergency alerts, while police swarmed one of America’s most prestigious campuses. For many, this was their first encounter with such terror. But for two students, the moment felt disturbingly familiar.
Mia Tretta and Zoe Weissman were not just witnesses to the chaos at Brown. They were survivors of previous school shootings, and this latest attack forced them to relive traumas they believed were behind them. What was unfolding on campus felt less like a shocking news event and more like a cruel repetition of history.
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Two people were killed and nine others were wounded when a man dressed in black opened fire inside the Barus and Holley engineering building on Saturday afternoon. Final exam review sessions were taking place at the time. As the suspect fled and remained at large, hundreds of police officers spent the night searching the campus and nearby neighborhoods, while students were ordered to shelter in place.
Weissman was in her dorm room when she received a call from a friend warning her that a shooting was under way. Panic set in almost immediately, but it soon turned into anger. Years earlier, at just 12 years old, she had witnessed the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida, where 17 people were killed. She had believed that surviving something like that once meant it would never happen again.
Tretta’s story is just as painful. In 2019, she was shot in the abdomen during an attack at Saugus High School near Los Angeles. Two people were killed in that shooting, including her best friend. On the day of the Brown attack, she had planned to study in the same building where the shooting later took place, but changed her mind at the last minute because she felt tired. That small decision may have saved her life.
Both students said they had assumed the odds of experiencing another shooting were almost impossible. That belief was shattered in an instant. As Weissman put it, the idea that this could happen twice is no longer unthinkable, and that realization is deeply unsettling.
The attack has once again reignited conversations around gun violence in the United States. With hundreds of mass shootings already recorded this year, the sense that no place is truly safe continues to grow. For survivors like Tretta and Weissman, the emotional toll goes beyond fear. It is marked by disbelief, exhaustion, and a haunting question that lingers in the air: how many times does someone have to survive before real change is made?
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