A survivor of the Parkland school shooting was also traumatized by the Brown University shooting

It’s rare for anyone to claim to have lived through a mass shooting, let alone two.

But at just 20 years old, Zoe Weissman is now part of a group no one would choose to join.

The sophomore says he was in his dorm room on the Brown University campus on December 13, when he received a nasty phone call from a friend. Weissman says he immediately suspected a shooting.

“That’s something my mind always goes through because of my trauma,” Weissman said As It Happened hosted by Nil Koksal.

In 2018, Weissman says he was outside a nearby middle school when he heard gunshots. The Valentine’s Day massacre at Major Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. 17 people were killed. Weissman was 12 years old at the time.

He says the experience left a lasting impression. He struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and later became involved in gun violence prevention efforts.

“Of course I’m more alert, I’m more aware of my surroundings than my peers, so I think that’s the second I heard there was an active shooter. [at Brown University]I went into like … survival mode,” Weissman said.

“I knew exactly what to do, and I think part of that is that my generation grew up with drills and school shootings within us.”

As the alerts began to go in and it became clear that the shooting was isolated to the university’s engineering building, Weissman says he went into fight-or-flight mode, closing and locking his bedroom door.

The closure lasted until 6 a.m. the next morning. He says he spent those painful hours watching the news for updates and contacting family members, who tried to calm him down – again.

“They were also frustrated,” Weissman said. “They were devastated for me; they were devastated that they had to go through it again.”

A shooting incident in Providence, Rhode Island, left two people dead and nine injured.

It took the police five more days to find the suspect accused of murdering a Massachusetts professor before taking his own life..

So far in 2025, there have been at least 394 mass shootings in the United States, according to the report. Archive of gun violence.

Weissman says she struggles not only with grief and sadness, but anger and frustration.

“I think my experience is an indication that if we allow gun violence to continue in America like this, it’s going to affect everyone personally, and it has affected a lot of people personally,” Weissman said.

It turns out Weissman wasn’t the only survivor of gun violence at Brown University last Saturday.

Mia Tretta, 21, was shot in the stomach by a fellow student who killed two other people during the shootout. Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, in 2019. Now a junior at Brown, he was studying in his bedroom when his phone started ringing with emergency alerts last Saturday.

“Nobody should have fired one shot, let alone two,” Tretta told The Associated Press during the incident. telephone interview last Sunday. And as someone who was shot at my high school when I was 15 years old, I never thought I would have to go through this again.”

Weissman, now a medical anthropology student, says experiences like this are part of what led him to become involved in the fight against gun violence in 2019, a process he describes as cathartic and central to his healing. He says he and Tretta have been in touch since the Brown shooting, talking about “things [they] when do you want to do it [they] come back to campus.”

“It makes me feel productive, like I’m doing something, especially when your trauma is related to this big issue that feels like you’re out of control,” Weissman said.

He says, it usually takes people being victimized by gun violence to see that prohibition is “worth giving up guns” or “having restrictions” on guns, but by then it’s too late.

Weissman says his message to Americans fighting gun reform is simple.

“The goal is not to take away everyone’s guns,” Weissman said. “The goal is to make sure that people who are serious about committing these crimes can’t get guns, and that shouldn’t affect you if you’re a law-abiding citizen who wants to protect yourself and whatnot.”