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Brown University Student Reflects On Her Second Mass Shooting: 'I'm Really Angry'

A Brown University student said surviving Saturday’s mass shooting at the college made her feel like she was 12 years old again in Parkland, Florida, surviving that mass shooting in 2018.

“Mentally, I feel like I’m 12 again,” Zoe Weissman, a sophomore at Brown University, told MS NOW. “This just feels exactly like how I felt in 2018. But honestly, I’m really angry. I’m really angry that this is happening to me all over again. And I’m just in shock.”

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Weissman was a 12-year-old middle schooler at Westglades Middle School, just down the road from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, where in 2018, a gunman killed 17 people and injured 18 others.

On Saturday, a person with a gun opened fire in Brown’s engineering building, killing two people and injuring nine others. A person of interest was taken into custody Sunday morning. Weissman told MS NOW she was in her dorm about to study for finals when her friend called to tell her about the mass shooting.

“My experience is so important because it shows that no one is safe from this,” Weissman said. “Until our Congresspeople actually decide to do something and care about children, care about their constituents, care about people in this country, this will continue to happen, and there will be more people like me who have survived several school shootings.”

After Brown’s shooting, Vice President JD Vance wrote on social media that he was “thinking of and praying for the victims.”

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Weissman called Vance’s words “laughable.”

“If they actually cared about us, and they were actually praying for us and they actually wanted us to do well, they would do something to end the gun violence problem in this country,” she said.

She added: “We’re fed up with the current administration and Congress’ inaction.”

Weissman said she has PTSD from Parkland, and is “hypervigilant” about security and has always felt safe on Brown’s campus. She said she picked Brown in part because she felt safe there, as well as in Rhode Island, citing a law the state passed in June banning the sale of “military-style weapons,” which doesn’t go into effect until July.

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“I think that goes to show that no matter how many security measures you implement, no matter how safe you feel, until we actually solve the issue of gun violence, everyone is vulnerable,” she said.

Mia Tretta, another student at Brown University, told NBC News that she was shot during the 2019 mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California.

“No one in this country even assumes it’s going to happen to them,” said Tretta. “Once it happens to you, you assume or are told it will never happen again, and obviously that is not the case.”

She continued: “I have not been the same person I was that day ever again, and I assume it won’t be any different for the students at Brown.”

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Weissman said people surviving multiple mass shootings is not a “new phenomenon.” Emma Riddle was a freshman at Michigan State University during the college’s mass shooting in 2023, and in 2021, she was a senior during Oxford High School’s mass shooting. Jacquelyn Matthews, another MSU survivor, was a student at Reed Intermediate School, which went into lockdown, at the time of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.

“I am 21 years old, and this is the second mass shooting that I have now lived through,” Matthews said in a 2023 TikTok video.