A 21-year-old Brown University student who was injured in a 2019 shooting at a high school north of Los Angeles said she remains resolved to speak for victims of gun violence following the two campus attacks nearly 3,000 miles and six years apart.
Mia Tretta, 21, was injured and her best friend was one of two people killed in November 2019 when a 16-year-old boy opened fire at Saugus High School in the Santa Clarita Valley.
Six years later, Tretta, now a junior at Brown University, was part of a frightening lockdown when a gunman opened fire Dec. 13 on the Rhode Island campus. Two students were killed and nine people were wounded.
Tretta and other students were part of a tense campus lockdown that lasted hours.
“My life has been forever altered,” Tretta said. “I am not the same person, and I’m not the same compared to my 21-year-old counterparts who have never been shot in a school shooting. And, you know, even in small ways that seems kind of silly. My life has been impacted. I’ve never entered a library on my own at Brown University.”
Tretta said she chose Brown because she believed its smaller size — an enrollment of about 12,000 students — in the community of Providence would make it a safer place.
“Here at Brown, I felt safer that I did other places,” Tretta said. “It felt like, ‘Of course, it won’t happen again.’ It already did, but here we are.”
Mia Tretta, who was injured at the high school shooting, said she felt safe at Brown.
In an interview with NBC News, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said that the suspect in the Brown University attack and another shooting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that killed a professor had the attacks “very well planned out” and tried to elude law enforcement. The shooter later died by suicide, authorities said.
The Saugus High School shooter also died by suicide.
“With the person killing themselves like what happened in Saugus, very similar experiences, despite at Saugus there was no multiple day manhunt,” Tretta said. “You can’t get justice.”
Tretta is one of two Brown students who were part of previous school campus attacks. Twenty-year-old Zoe Weissman, who was in her university dorm Saturday during the Brown shooting, attended a middle school next to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a former student opened fire in 2018, killing 17.
Dominic Blackwell, 14, and 15-year-old Gracie Anne Muehlberger were killed in the shooting at Saugus High School. The 45-caliber handgun used in the attack was assembled from a kit, the purchase of which would likely bypass California law that requires a background check before the purchase of a complete factory-made weapon.
Tretta, 15 at the time of the Saugus High School shooting, became a firearms safety advocate. She was part of public education campaigns that addressed the dangers of so-called ghost guns and their proliferation.
“I don’t do gun violence prevention work for myself,” Tretta said. “I do it because Dominic and Gracie, they can’t advocate for themselves. They can’t tell their own stories anymore. And I choose to every day get up and make sure that I can be that person for them.”
Tretta was a junior in high school when she introduced President Biden before he signed federal legislation to address ghost guns. She introduced California Gov. Newsom when he signed a state law that allowed private individuals to sue people who illegally make or sell assault weapons or ghost gun components.
She also interned at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, helping to organize the ATF’s inaugural Gun Violence Survivors Summit.
Tretta, who was doing a research paper on surviving a school shooting, said returning to Brown will be difficult after the holidays, but that she believes students and the community will unite.