The Unexpected Cost Of Gun Violence That Brown University Survivors Are Left To Pay

Surviving a mass school shooting already has devastating consequences on a student’s mind and body ― but gun violence also exacts a high price on students’ and their families’ finances.

Mia Tretta, who is now a two-time school shooting survivor, knows this all too well.

In 2019, when she was a 15-year-old high school student in California, Tretta got shot in the stomach during a mass school shooting that killed two students, including Tretta’s best friend. Now a 21-year-old Brown student in Rhode Island, Tretta experienced that same trauma again.

Tretta was hanging out in her dorm room when she got school alerts about an active shooter on campus. Someone had opened fire inside a Brown University engineering building where students were prepping for an exam, killing two and wounding nine others. The suspected shooter was later found dead, but he initially escaped. Fearing the shooter was still at large, many Brown students like Tretta have said that they changed their flights to go home sooner.

“The school was eerie,” Tretta said. “I feel like we had this weight lifted off everyone’s shoulders when the supposed gunman was in custody, and then I was with friends the night where they … said it was the wrong person, and you can just feel this dread go back over everyone.”

Tretta initially was going to pay an extra $200 to change her Delta flight to an earlier flight, but her mother, Tiffany Tretta, later got the airline to waive the fee through her Delta status.

The same night of the shooting, Brown junior Gia Shin said she was able to score a free car ride back home to New Jersey from her friend’s dad, who drove straight through a snowstorm to retrieve Shin and her friend. “If I didn’t have that, though, I would have had to rebook my train ticket for sure [to come home earlier],” she said. “I don’t have any of my stuff with me right now. I only have what I brought that morning on Saturday when I left my dorm.”

Some airlines, like Delta and American Airlines — but not all — have offered help to waive students’ rebooking fees. In the meantime, school alumni are stepping up. Immediately after the Brown shooting, Autumn Wong, a Palm Beach, Florida, resident and recent Brown University graduate and medical school applicant, drained her own checking account to cover the flights of five Brown undergraduates who sought immediate help with rebooking. “I stayed up for 24 hours that first night just booking people on flights,” she recalled.

A few of the people Wong helped were students she has met through her work as a Brown resident adviser, but now that number has grown past her budget. Wong started a GoFundMe to help raise money for students’ transportation costs that, so far, has helped at least 46 students either rebook or offset their airline change fees, she said.

“People will do whatever they can to get home,” Wong said. “I know one person, their parents took out loans to pay for their flight.” Wong was able to later reimburse that student through the fundraiser.

As of Dec. 19, students are seeking $15,503 in reimbursement for flight scheduling issues.

Brown University does offer its own resources, including an emergency fund for income-eligible students with unique circumstances, and the school’s Undergraduate Council of Students, which has a Student Emergency Support Fund. There is also a working online document that lists surrounding businesses offering discounts to students and Providence, Rhode Island, community members offering free car rides for students.

“It’s definitely more [resources] than we had at Saugus [High School, where Tretta was shot]. Brown is also just such a bigger, more well-funded community,” Tretta said.

But unfortunately, transportation costs are just the beginning of the financial burdens they face, according to school shooting survivors and their families.

For victims of mass shootings, the hospital bills are astronomical. Medical costs for mass shooting injuries average $64,976 per person, according to a 2022 study, which looked at 403 patients from 13 incidents over seven years. Injuries included suffering falls while fleeing gunshots, as well as survivors’ medical needs after initial treatments.

Mia Tretta’s mother said her teen daughter’s initial hospital stay after she got shot totaled over $178,000.

“At the moment, you don’t care what anything’s going to cost, as long as they heal your child,” Tiffany Tretta said. “And then the bills start to roll in for different doctors and different assistants and anesthesiologists and helicopter rides, ambulance fees.”

The Tretta family had private insurance and applied for California’s gun violence victim’s compensation fund ― a service that every state offers ― which helped with reimbursing treatments that insurance did not cover. Tiffany Tretta considers herself lucky that she could dedicate all her time to her daughter’s insurance paperwork, driving her to appointments and paying for hospital parking: “We told Mia … we would always take care of anything we could for her, just to lighten this, because it’s just a shitty hand that she was dealt.”

It became Tiffany Tretta’s job to submit and resubmit reimbursement claims for her child. “You do have to pay for it initially, and then wait to be reimbursed,” she said. She recalled having to explain to an insurance adjuster asking for a responsible party that the gunman had died by suicide after the shooting. “You’re trying to explain something that completely shattered and wrecked your life, and explain that there isn’t somebody [else] that can be financially responsible for this, and so I guess it is just us.”

There are also unexpected costs a gun violence survivor may need to pay years later to feel whole again. Mia Tretta wants to have kids one day, but being shot in her lower stomach has affected this possibility.

“This coming summer, I’m freezing my eggs because there’s so much uncertainty of whether or not I’ll be able to have kids on my own, and all my doctors have recommended just doing it now,” she said. “So that’s something that the state is obviously not going to cover, because it’s not an essential thing, but feels pretty essential to me.”

Tiffany Tretta said the estimate for her daughter’s egg-freezing is $20,000.

The ongoing mental health costs to deal with the effects of gun violence can be lifelong. Erika Felix, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies children’s long-term mental health following mass shootings, said that “many people will recover and be resilient,” but the most common trauma symptoms can include elevated symptoms of anxiety, untreated post-traumatic stress disorder that could evolve into depression, and having trouble concentrating and paying attention in classes.

Zoe Weissman is only 20, but the Brown shooting is also her second mass school shooting. In 2018, at 12 years old, Weissman was a student at Westglades Middle School, which is next to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where a former student fatally shot 17 students in Parkland, Florida.

In Florida, Weissman had a child psychologist that did not accept insurance, and Weissman said her family paid “upwards of $200 per appointment” because she “saw that private therapist for over six years and at the height of my treatment was seeing her weekly.”

“I am grateful that my family was able to afford a private psychologist, but a majority of families cannot do so,” Weissman said. “Although they were able to pay, it’s undoubtedly cost them tens of thousands of dollars, something that I do feel guilty about even though I know I need the help and my family is more than willing to provide it for me.”

Mia Tretta said she initially went to a therapy program for victims of violent crime that was covered by the state of California, but said this is hard for many other victims to get into “because there’s so many waitlists and just not enough providers for victims.” As an adult, she is now seeing a therapist who is covered by her insurance: “It’s about $15 a visit, but $15 once a week for 50 weeks out of the year, it really adds up,” she said.

What someone needs to feel safer can go beyond therapy costs. Tretta said she got $200 noise-canceling headphones to study because loud noises are a trigger for her. “Someone dropping a book in the library that no one else would really be fazed by” is a trigger, she said.

Shin said she is grateful she didn’t have to pay for her ride back home, but she expects to pay more for Ubers in the future to get around campus after dark.

A mass shooting in a community hurts everyone, even if they were not directly affected. A 2022 study by nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety estimated that gun violence causes a $557 billion loss a year due to immediate costs like medical treatment and long-term costs like criminal justice system resources, lost wages, and diminished quality of life for victims and their families.

But beyond the medical bills and transportation fees, there is also the incalculable cost of one’s sense of safety that no amount of money can restore.

Shin is shaken by the fact that she almost went to the engineering building to study for her finals with her friends last weekend. “We were about to head into the engineering building when another friend intercepted us and said, ‘Oh, let’s go to the Rock [library] instead,’” she recalled. “For that [decision] to become such a huge life-defining and significant moment is so scary to think about … A lot of my friends are also grappling with that, too.”

No one is the same after witnessing and surviving gun violence.

“The biggest cost for me has been a loss of my old sense of ‘normal,’” Weissman said. “After developing PTSD, I had to learn how to accept that my life would forever be different: I am hyper-vigilant in public, my senses are incredibly heightened, and I experience a higher baseline level of anxiety.”

Tretta said the “mental load” of surviving a shooting is also a big repercussion people like her deal with for years, if not decades.

For Brown students like her, Weissman said, obtaining mental health treatment will certainly be a longer-term cost. But that’s a price that can be paid.

“However, the loss of innocence and safety is something that is priceless,” she said.