‘Survivor 48’ Star Eva Erickson Narrowly Avoided Brown University Shooting: ‘So, So Extremely Lucky’

Survivor 48 runner-up Eva Erickson feels “extremely lucky” that she’s safe and sound following the deadly school shooting at Brown University on Saturday.

In an Instagram video posted from lockdown at the school’s Olney-Margolies Athletic Center last night, Erickson revealed she narrowly avoided the shooting location, explaining that she was at work in the same building just minutes prior.

“The active shooter warning initially went out at 4:22 p.m.,” she said. “The shooting took place in [the] Barus and Holley [Building], which is the building that my office is in. I am so, so extremely lucky that I was very unproductive at work today, because I was in my office in Barus and Holley in that area until 4 p.m.”

Erickson decided, impulsively, to leave work and go the gym. “I left, and about 20 minutes later, we get the warning,” she said. “There’s now a rumor that the warning was sent out about 15 minutes after the shooting had started. I was leaving the building within five minutes of the shooter coming in.”

 

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At the gym, people turned off the lights and pulled down the shades, Erickson said. “And everyone sat on the ground getting tons of texts, calls, calling our parents, telling people we love them, texting all of our friends. ‘Where are you? Are you OK?’” she added.

About four hours later, the lights came back on. “They said that they were going to move us,” Erickson recalled. “We are able now to look out the windows. There are SWAT teams all over. And they have us take all of our belongings, register who we are, where we were, get a wristband, and they walked us two buildings over to go to the OMAC, so that’s where I currently am. Now, once we got to the OMAC, I was able to meet up with other members of my hockey team who came from other places. So I had a few teammates who were in the science library, and they were moved over here as well, but they were taken by bus. And so from their perspective, they had been in classrooms or in office spaces in the science library, and they had to barricade the doors.”

At the time of her video message, it was 11 p.m., and the shooter was still at large, Erickson said. “We have no answers,” she told followers. “Don’t know if we’re going to be here overnight. Do what we gotta to do to be safe. I really appreciate the thoughts and prayers that everyone’s sending, but we need more than thoughts and prayers. This is ridiculous that as college students … we have to worry about someone shooting up our classrooms.”

Officials in Providence, Rhode Island, said on Sunday that an individual was in custody in connection with the shooting, according to The New York Times. Two students were killed, and nine were injured in Saturday’s attack.

Erickson, who was the first openly autistic cast member of Survivor, is a Ph.D. candidate in engineering and fluid and thermal science at Brown’s School of Engineering, according to an article on the university’s website.