Mia Tretta was sitting in her Brown University dorm room with friends when she got a text message about an active shooter. She didn’t believe it at first − despite her own painful experience with school shootings.
Tretta was a freshman at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, on Nov. 14, 2019 when a gunman armed with a .45 caliber semiautomatic handgun shot and killed two students and injured three others. Tretta’s best friend died, and she was shot in the stomach.
“I came to Brown because I wanted to get away from what happened to me in Saugus, and I wanted to be able to kind of live my life without constantly thinking about this,” she told USA TODAY. “Now it’s followed me here.”
On Dec. 13, a gunman burst into a building on Brown's campus and fatally shot two students and injured nine others studying for an economics exam at the Providene, Rhode Island university.
For two students at the Ivy League School, the response to an active shooter on their campus was all too familiar.
