Mia Tretta, a junior at Brown University, was shaken when emergency alerts about a shooting rang on her phone during finals week. Tretta survived a mass shooting at Saugus High School in 2019, where she was shot in the abdomen. Following an alarming series of messages, it was confirmed that a tragic incident unfolded on the Brown campus, resulting in two fatalities and nine injuries.
After the filters of fear and disbelief wore off, Tretta expressed her heart-wrenching thoughts: “No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two.” The distress of revisiting such nightmares struck hard for students who have spent years preparing for these grim situations with lockdown drills.
Tretta's story brings light to a harrowing truth many students face today—having navigated through multiple shootings during different phases of their lives; another Brown student commented on how their middle school was next to Parkland High School during the 2018 tragedy. The repeated exposure to violence calls for urgent conversations surrounding gun regulations and the safety of students on educational grounds.
As she copes with this traumatic experience and prepares paper on the academic implications of school shootings, Tretta believes healing and ensuring the safety of students like her must become a priority in order to prevent such tragedies from happening again.
