A Brown University student survived being shot in high school. Then came the active shooter alerts

On Saturday, Tretta was studying in her dorm with a friend when the first message arrived, warning of an emergency at the university’s engineering building. Something must have happened, she thought, but surely it couldn't be a shooting.

As more alerts poured in, urging people to lock down and stay away from windows, the familiarity of the language made clear what she had feared. By the end of the day, two people were dead and nine others injured in the Providence, Rhode Island, shooting that once again upended a school campus.

“No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two,” Tretta said in a phone interview Sunday. “And as someone who was shot at my high school when I was 15 years old, I never thought that this was something I’d have to go through again.”

Tretta’s experience captures a grim reality for a generation now in college: students who grew up rehearsing lockdowns and active-shooter drills, only to encounter the same violence again years later on campuses that once seemed like an escape from it.

In recent years, small groups of students have endured multiple mass shootings at different stages of their education, including survivors of the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who later experienced a deadly shooting at Florida State University in April.

Another Brown student, Zoe Weissman, reflected on social media about attending middle school next door to the Parkland high school during the mass killing there. She said she was outside the middle school when the shooting happened, and heard gunshots and screams, saw first responders and then watched videos of what happened.

Louisville, Kentucky, Mayor Craig Greenberg said on Facebook that his son Ben, a junior at Brown, is safe after using furniture to barricade himself and his roommates inside their room. Greenberg survived an assassination attempt during his mayoral campaign in 2022.

After Tretta was shot in high school, she pushed for tighter gun restrictions and rose to a leadership role with the group Students Demand Action. Her advocacy took her to the White House under former President Joe Biden, and she also met with his former Attorney General Merrick Garland.

She has particularly focused on “ghost guns,” such as the one used at her high school, that can be built from parts and make it difficult to track or regulate owners.

And at Brown, Tretta had been working on a paper about the educational journeys of students who have lived through school shootings, a subject shaped by her own experience. The paper was due in a few days.

Tretta, who studies international and public affairs and education, said Saturday was the first time she’d gotten such an active shooter alert at Brown.

“I chose Brown, a place that I love, because it felt like somewhere I could finally be safe and finally, you know, be normal in this new normal that I live of a school shooting survivor,” she said. “And it’s happened again. And it didn’t have to.”