CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – UNC senior Bella Miller is often at the gym as a student-athlete. But on August 28th, when the Carolina Alert went off, Miller was in her class at the Kenan-Flagler Business School.
“I’m going to text my mom again that there’s another shooting at my school,” Miller said. “How ironic.”
The other shooting she’s talking about is the day a gunman opened fire at her school in Parkland, Florida, five years ago.
“Definitely a crazy thing to go through in my first year of high school,” Miller said. “I was expecting it to be all High School Musical, rainbows, musicals but I got 17 of my classmates and peers dead instead.”
Miller has had one too many close calls with deadly school shootings. Upon graduation from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, she had a sports scholarship to attend Michigan State, where a gunman shot and killed three people in February.
“I remember texting my mom right after the Michigan State shooting being like, mom, thank God I didn’t go there,” Miller said. “I would have had to go through this all over again.”
Months later, however, a deadly shooting took her right back to the horrific moments in Parkland.
“The fact that my professor wouldn’t stop teaching and wouldn’t really even lock down our classroom was just like, really triggering for me,” Miller said. “I was like, someone can walk in here at any minute, and we would have absolutely nothing to do.”
Miller said the shootings have taken a toll on her mental health, something only those who have survived shootings can only understand.
“These problems are so ongoing, even since I was 15 years old,” Miller said. “I’m now 20 and I’ve seen almost no change. It’s sickening that kids just have to keep dying until someone decides they want to make change.”
As for decision makers at UNC, she would like to see improvements in their communication efforts. Students, she says, should speak up and tell their stories.
“Being a survivor of shootings for me kind of gives me a reason to keep pushing,” Miller said. “There are a lot of people that I knew who don’t have the ability anymore because they’re gone.”