One was injured in the California school shooting, and the other heard the gunshots and watched the emergency response to the Florida school shooting.
Student survivors of multiple mass shootings speak out
Mia Torretta survived the Brown University shooting after surviving a high school shooting in which she was shot in the abdomen.
Mia Torretta was sitting with friends in her dorm at Brown University when she received a text message about a gunman. Despite her own painful experiences with school shootings, she didn’t believe it at first.
Torretta was a freshman at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. On November 14, 2019, a man armed with a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun opened fire, killing two students and injuring three others. Torretta’s best friend was shot in the abdomen and died.
“I came to Brown because I wanted to escape what happened to me in Saugus, and I wanted to live my life without thinking about this all the time,” she told USA TODAY. “I’ve been chasing you this far.”
On December 13, a gunman burst into a building on the Brown University campus at Providen College in Rhode Island, fatally shooting two students taking an economics exam and wounding nine others.
For two students at an Ivy League school, the reaction to a mass shooting on campus was all too familiar.
“I was scared like everyone else, confused and a little disgusted that this could happen not just once in my life, but twice,” Toretta said.
Toretta, a junior at Brown University studying international relations and education, recalled the moment she learned of the shooting on campus.
“The fire alarm always goes off, but there’s usually no fire,” she recalled thinking.
Then there was a flurry of text messages and the campus went into lockdown.
Torretta said her friends hunkered down in stairwells, basements and classrooms for hours “without doing anything.”
But her heart went to the victim.
“I was one of the people talked about in critical condition at a press conference six years ago, and now there are eight more people in critical condition,” Torretta said. “I understand what it feels like to be there.”
The shooting that injured Torretta in 2019 lasted eight seconds, she said. Her road to recovery took years and included a two-week hospital stay, multiple surgeries, physical therapy, and an ongoing battle.
Torretta and her mother, Tiffany Shepis Torreta, became gun violence activists in the years following the 2019 mass shooting. Once she graduates, Toretta hopes to turn her activism into a full-time job.
“America is the only country that accepts gun violence as a fact of life. It doesn’t have to be that way,” she said. “At the end of the day, no life should ever be lost to gun violence, but we should have addressed it as soon as it happened.”
The mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, became emotional as he spoke at a news conference about the frequency of shootings. One of the university students in the hospital told him, “It gave me hope, but it also made me very sad.”
“One of the students who showed tremendous courage literally said to me, ‘That target practice you had me do in high school actually helped me in that moment,'” Mayor Brett Smiley said. “They shouldn’t have to do actual marksmanship training, but it was helpful. And the reason it was helpful, and the reason we do these drills, is because it’s so frequent.”
“Policymakers should be ashamed.”
On December 14, 2012, a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, killing 20 first graders and six educators. It was considered one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history.
In the 13 years since then, hundreds of Americans have been killed in mass shootings across the country, with the latest mass shooting occurring in Brown.
Zoe Wiseman, a dark-skinned sophomore, was sitting outside her middle school in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018 when a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School next door, killing 17 students and teachers.
“The schools share a field and I was outside, so I was closest to Douglas without actually being on school grounds,” Wiseman told the Providence Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network.
She heard gunshots and saw paramedics arrive at the school to treat the injured.
Wiseman, now 20, was also in his dorm room at Brown University when gunshots rang out inside the Barth & Hawley building.
Wiseman said he was diagnosed with PTSD after the Parkland shooting. Both she and Toretta said they feel in a position to help Brown University students cope with this tragedy.
“This is something I’ve felt every day for the past seven or eight years,” Wiseman said. “I know how to deal with this issue because I’ve been to therapy, so I feel privileged to be in a position where I can help[my colleagues]learn how to deal with this issue the same way I did.”
But Wiseman said he blames policymakers for putting students in this situation by not passing more comprehensive gun control measures in the seven years since the Parkland shooting.
“Policymakers should be ashamed of themselves for letting things go so that someone like me has to go through this twice,” Wiseman said. “And if they actually care about their constituents, they’ll show it by passing a comprehensive gun violence prevention bill, and if they don’t, I refuse to believe that they actually care about the people who elected them.”
