Surviving a mass school shooting already has devastating consequences on a student’s mind and body ― but gun violence also exacts a high price on students’ and their families’ finances.
Mia Tretta, who is now a two-time school shooting survivor, knows this all too well.
In 2019, when she was a 15-year-old high school student in California, Tretta got shot in the stomach during a mass school shooting that killed two students, including Tretta’s best friend. Now a 21-year-old Brown student in Rhode Island, Tretta experienced that same trauma again.
Tretta was hanging out in her dorm room when she got school alerts about an active shooter on campus. Someone had opened fire inside a Brown University engineering building where students were prepping for an exam, killing two and wounding nine others. The suspected shooter was later found dead, but he initially escaped. Fearing the shooter was still at large, many Brown students like Tretta have said that they changed their flights to go home sooner.
“The school was eerie,” Tretta said. “I feel like we had this weight lifted off everyone’s shoulders when the supposed gunman was in custody, and then I was with friends the night where they ... said it was the wrong person, and you can just feel this dread go back over everyone.”
