In 2019, a 16-year-old student at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, pulled a gun from his backpack and opened fire on his classmates in the school quad. Mia Tretta, then a 15-year-old freshman, was shot in the abdomen and hospitalized. Her best friend was killed.
The shooting shaped Tretta’s decision to attend Brown University, in a state she deemed to have strong gun laws and located far away from home, on the opposite coast from the trauma that upended her time in high school.
On Saturday, a shooter attacked her school for the second time.
“I found a place where I finally started to feel comfortable,” Tretta, now a 21-year-old junior at Brown, told The Washington Post. “And it’s been taken again.”
Tretta is now part of a grim community of students who have lived through multiple school shootings in American schools and colleges. It includes survivors of the 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, who enrolled at Florida State University, where a gunman killed two people in April, and a woman who lived through a deadly shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan, in 2021, and another shooting at Michigan State University two years later.
After a gunman burst into an auditorium-style classroom at Brown Saturday in a shooting that killed at least two students and injured nine more, according to authorities, Tretta said she will watch her friends at Brown go through the same grief and terror that changed her life.
“Everyone’s confused and uncertain of what to do and just kind of lost,” she said.
Tretta’s recovery from her shooting in high school was long and lonely. She required multiple surgeries, she said, and then was separated from her grieving school community by the covid-19 pandemic.
But the experience also gave her purpose. She became an activist for gun control, writing op-eds, joining the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety and speaking to audiences about ghost guns, one of which was used in the Saugus High School shooting. In 2022, she spoke at the White House when President Joe Biden announced regulations cracking down on ghost guns.
Through Everytown, she also became part of a network of school shooting survivors that connects teenagers and young adults struggling with trauma from their experiences, The Post reported in 2022.
“If I look at my contacts, I see someone’s name and then what school they were shot at,” Tretta told The Post at the time.
At Brown, Tretta has continued her advocacy. She leads the university chapter of Students Demand Action, Everytown’s youth advocacy group, and advocated for an assault weapon ban passed in Rhode Island this year.
But traveling across the country for university was also a chance for Tretta to find a fresh start and reclaim a sense of safety she said was shattered after she was shot in high school. She became a peer counselor and joined an all-female a cappella group, the Ursa Minors.
The comfort of her new surroundings disappeared when she heard an active shooter alarm on Saturday.
“This is definitely going to set me back in a tremendous way,” Tretta said.
Tretta was not at the site of the shooting and was studying in her dorm Saturday, she said. She sheltered in place as police searched for the gunman and worried about how her parents would react to the news. They talked through the night.
“It’s terrifying to have received a text six years ago saying, ‘Mom, there’s been a shooting, I’ve been shot,’” Tretta said. “And now receive this other text, ‘There’s a shooting, and I don’t know what’s happening.’”
Tretta said she hopes she can use her experience talking to school shooting survivors to help others at Brown as the university grieves. She wishes she didn’t have to.
“I’ve done this before,” she said. “[It] shouldn’t have to be so close to home.”
The post She was shot at 15 in a school shooting. Brown was another close call. appeared first on Washington Post.
