Brown Student Mia Tretta Faces Second Campus Shooting After 2019 Trauma

Brown University student Mia Tretta felt the familiar sting of a mass shooting when an emergency alert buzzed on her phone during finals week. She had lived through a similar nightmare in 2019 when a gunman shot her in the abdomen at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, killing two students and wounding three others. The alert that Saturday warned of an emergency at the university’s engineering building, and as more messages urged lockdowns and window‑closing, Tretta realized the words were no longer hypothetical.

The Unfolding Crisis at Brown

The Providence shooting unfolded in the same way that previous campus tragedies had: a gunman opened fire in a crowded area, killing two people and injuring nine others. By the end of the day, the campus was left shaken and the emergency alerts had become a grim reminder of the violence that could erupt at any moment. Tretta told a phone interview on Sunday that “No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two,” and added, “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.”

Repeated Trauma

Tretta’s experience is not isolated. Students who grew up rehearsing lockdowns and active‑shooter drills now face the same violence on campuses that once seemed like an escape from it. Survivors of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Parkland, Florida, later endured a deadly shooting at Florida State University in April. Zoe Weissman, a Brown student, reflected on the Parkland shooting while she was in middle school next door to the high school, saying she was outside when the gunfire started, heard the screams, and later watched videos of the event.

Survivor Stories

Ben Greenberg, the son of Louisville’s mayor, experienced a different but equally terrifying incident in 2022. While in biology class at his high school, the principal pulled him out of class and two police officers escorted him to meet his mother. He was told that his father had survived an assassination attempt, and a gunman had stormed into the mayor’s office, firing a bullet that ripped a hole in Greenberg’s sweater. The event left Greenberg “often on edge after that, terrified violence could take his family from him at any moment,” he said. When he moved to Providence to attend Brown, he finally felt he could relax a little.

Now 20, Greenberg lives directly across the street from the building where the shooting occurred Saturday afternoon. He and his roommates feared the gunman could be hiding in their house. To protect themselves, they built a barricade at the top of the stairs with a mini‑fridge and a bookcase, and placed bottles behind it so that if someone knocked it over, the rattle of the bottles would alert them. He talked to his parents on the phone all night, and they could hear the terror in his voice, said his father, Mayor Craig Greenberg. The assassination attempt changed their family forever, Craig Greenberg said. This shooting will, too.

“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,” said Greenberg, a Democrat. “My hope is that eventually our nation will come together to take meaningful action, even if it’s small steps at first, we have to do something.”

Advocacy and Impact

After her own shooting in high school, Tretta pushed for tighter gun restrictions and rose to a leadership role with Students Demand Action. Her advocacy led her to the White House under former President Joe Biden, and she also met with former Attorney General Merrick Garland. She has focused on “ghost guns,” such as the one used at her high school, that can be built from parts and make it difficult to track or regulate owners. At Brown, Tretta had been working on a paper about the educational journeys of students who have lived through school shootings, a subject shaped by her own experience. The paper was due in a few days.

“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 didn’t have to.”

The Paper and the Future

Tretta studies international and public affairs and education. Her research examines how surviving a mass shooting can alter a student’s academic path and mental health. She hopes her paper will shed light on the long‑term effects of such trauma and inform policy. The Providence shooting has renewed the urgency of her work and the broader conversation about campus safety.

Key Takeaways

• Mia Tretta, a Brown University junior, was shot in the abdomen in 2019 and now survived a second campus shooting in Providence.
• Survivors from other tragedies, such as Zoe Weissman and Ben Greenberg, illustrate how gun violence continues to affect students across the country.
• Tretta’s advocacy for stricter gun laws, especially against ghost guns, and her research on the impact of shootings aim to change policy and protect future students.

The Providence shooting has once again shattered the illusion that college campuses are safe havens. For students like Mia Tretta, the experience underscores a painful reality: that the threat of gun violence remains a constant, and the fight for safer schools must continue.