The Brown University attack survivors had previously escaped separate school shooting incidents
In 2019, Mia Tretta suffered an abdominal gunshot wound at a school close to LA, and Zoe Weissman was present during a Florida shooting the year before.
When the deadly attack at Brown University occurred, students hid under desks and panicked as gunfire rang out, a scene all too familiar to at least two students.
Years ago, Mia Treta, 21, and Zoe Weisman, 20, both survived school shootings. “The thing that struck me the most was, ‘How dare this country let this happen to someone like me twice?’” Weisman told the New York Times.
A gunman dressed in black opened fire during a final exam at one of America’s most prestigious colleges on Saturday, killing two people and wounding nine others. Hundreds of police officers searched the campus and surrounding areas throughout the night as the suspect fled.
Weisman was in her dorm room at Brown when a friend called to warn her that a shooting was underway. She told NBC that her initial panic soon turned to anger. “I’m angry that I thought I would never have to deal with this again, and here I am eight years later,” Weissman told NBC News.
She was 12 years old when she witnessed a shooting at the high school near her middle school in Parkland, Florida. The 2018 shooting killed 17 people.
Treta was shot in the stomach in 2019 when a 16-year-old boy opened fire at Saugus High School near Los Angeles, killing two people, including her best friend.
“People always think it could never happen to them,” Treta told The New York Times. “And until I got shot at my school, I thought the same thing.”
On Saturday, she was studying in her dorm room. She had initially planned to study in the Barrs and Holly Engineering and Physics Building, where the shooting occurred, but changed her mind because she was feeling tired.
Saturday’s attack has once again drawn attention to long-standing calls for gun control in the US, where gun laws are among the most permissive in the developed world.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 389 mass shootings across the US so far this year. The archive defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot. More than 500 mass shootings were reported last year.
On Saturday, Treta and Weissman said they had assumed they would never have to witness a shooting again.
“One thing that gave me comfort was that statistically, it was practically impossible for this to ever happen to me again,” Weissman said. “And clearly, we’re reaching a point where nobody can say that anymore.”
