A Saugus High School alum who was shot during the 2019 campus shooting once again had to deal with gun violence on her campus this week, a story she shared with international media outlets.
Mia Tretta, 21, was near the end of another semester at Brown University on Saturday when a shooting killed two students and left nine more injured.
In a BBC interview Sunday, Tretta described her experience as a high school freshman in the Nov. 14, 2019, shooting in which the shooter killed two fellow students and injured four, including Tretta, who was shot in the stomach. The shooter, 16-year-old Nathaniel Berhow, then turned the gun on himself.
She said she lost her sense of safety and innocence as a result of the shooting.
“And those are things you can’t get back,” she said in the interview broadcast by BBC on Sunday. “I have to tell myself, ‘I’m never going to get shot again,’ and now, this has happened at my own school in my own community, just — again, in my lifetime.”
She described how, prior to the shooting, she had felt safer at the Ivy League campus and, “Of course it won’t happen again.”
Tretta has used her traumatic experience to become an advocate for more regulation of “ghost guns,” or unserialized firearms. Berhow used a .45-caliber handgun he assembled from such a firearm kit purchased online, according to previous coverage.
Tretta spoke at the White House in 2022 in an effort to rally support for ghost-gun legislation that ultimately passed and was recently upheld by the Supreme Court.
She was vocal as a Saugus High student on campus, leading a walkout in May 2022 around the same time, which also was in protest of the lives lost at the shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Tretta’s university wrote a story about her on the five-year anniversary of the Saugus High shooting last year, which told how the shooting started her on a journey of advocacy.
“I think this is a nonpartisan issue,” Tretta told The Signal during the demonstration. “This is about kids’ lives who are being ripped away from families. There’s 21 empty seats at a kitchen table right now. There’s 21 families who are crying in bed tonight, and that’s not OK. This can’t keep happening and you can’t just keep saying, ‘I’m so angry, I’m so furious, this can’t keep happening,’ and then let it happen again without change.”
According to Pew Center Research, the Centers for Disease Control reported 46,728 people died from gun-related injuries in 2023, the most recent year for which complete data is available.
That figure includes murders and suicides, and three less common types of gun-related deaths the CDC tracks: those that involved law enforcement, those that were accidental, and those whose circumstances could not be determined. About 58% were self-inflicted, per the data, and about 38% were considered murder.
