At least two of the Brown University students who were on campus when a deadly shooting unfolded there on Saturday have survived school shootings before.
One is Mia Tretta, a junior who was shot in the abdomen during a 2019 shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, Calif.
Ms. Tretta, 21, was studying for a final exam in her Brown dormitory on Saturday when she learned of the attack. She had been planning to study at the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building, where the shooting took place, but had changed her mind because she felt tired, she said in an interview.
“People always think, well, it’ll never be me,” said Ms. Tretta, one of five students shot in Santa Clarita, two of them fatally, by a 16-year-old classmate. “And until I was shot in my school, I also thought the same thing.”
Another Brown student, Zoe Weissman, 20, was 12 when she witnessed the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., from outside her middle school next door. She said she developed post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the shooting, in which 17 people were killed.
Ms. Weissman, a Brown sophomore, was in her dorm room during the attack on Saturday afternoon. She learned about it when a friend called to warn her.
Initially, she felt panicked and numb, she said. Those feelings gave way to anger. “What I’ve been feeling most is just, like, how dare this country allow this to happen to someone like me twice?” she said.
Both women said the shooting had damaged a sense of security they had cultivated for years based on the notion that they were unlikely to witness two school shootings in one lifetime.
“The one thing that gave me comfort was, like, statistically, it’s practically impossible for this to ever happen to me again,” Ms. Weissman said. “And clearly, we’re getting to a point where no one can say that anymore.”
Ms. Tretta said she had chosen Brown University because of its secure, intimate feel. “It felt like a safer place after my whole sense of safety, my whole sense of innocence, was taken away at Saugus.”
But the worst had happened to her community again, she said.
Camille Baker is a Times reporter covering New York City and its surrounding areas.
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