Survivor’s Eva Erickson Says She Was at Site of Brown Shooting Minutes Before Receiving Alert: ‘So Extremely Lucky’ By Bailey Richards

Survivor alum Eva Erickson was at Brown University during the shooting that claimed the lives of at least two students and injured several more. She says she is “so extremely lucky” to have survived the incident.

The Providence, R.I., univerisity first announced that there was an active shooter near Barus & Holley, a computer lab and engineering building on campus, shortly after 4 p.m. local time on Saturday, Dec. 13. The season 48 runner-up — who is currently a Ph.D. candidate in engineering and fluid and thermal science at the Ivy League school — had left the building just moments earlier, she said on Instagram.

Erickson, 25, first shared that she was “safe” in a since-expired Instagram Stories post on Saturday, Dec. 13, according to Entertainment Weekly. “I am safe,” she said in the initial post, adding that she is “very lucky I left my lab 15 minutes prior to the active shooter alert.”

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The Ph.D. candidate has since shared further details in an update video on Sunday, Dec. 14, while on “lockdown in place” at an athletic center at the Providence, R.I. campus, and another a day later.

In the first video, which she filmed around 11 p.m. on Saturday, Erickson said she’d just left the area where the shooting occurred when she received notification about the situation.

“I am so, so extremely lucky that I was very unproductive at work today, because I was in my office in Barus & Holley in that area until 4 p.m. and I was like, ‘Man, I’m just not getting anything done,’ put on my coat and randomly decided I would go to the gym,” she said. “I never go to the gym in the afternoon. I left, and about 20 minutes later, we get the warning.”

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Added Erickson: “I was leaving the building within five minutes of the shooter coming in.”

She was at the gym for about four hours before officials moved her to the athletic center, she said. In the immediate aftermath. “They turned on all the lights [in the gym], they pulled down all the shades, and everyone kind of sat on the ground,” she recalled, “getting tons of texts, calls, calling our parents, telling people we love them, texting all of our friends, ‘Where are you? Are you okay?’ ”

In another video update shared the next day, the Survivor runner-up said she, along with other students who live off-campus, was released from lockdown around 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 14. (Brown cancelled all exams in the wake of the attack and sent students home early for winter break.)

“On campus today has just been so eerie,” said Erickson. “Everybody is leaving. Everyone is trying to get the hell away from Brown to get home to their families, where they can feel safe.”

The Ph.D. candidate also shared gratitude for her community at the Providence university, who she said supported her while she was on Survivor. The fatal incident was “so close to impacting me,” she said in the update, “but they didn’t, and I’m lucky, and not everyone’s that lucky.”

“And you think that this is never gonna happen to you, it’s never gonna happen on your campus. It was never gonna happen on Brown, right?” said the Survivor alum. “But it did, and it could happen to anyone, and that’s what’s so scary.”

“It just makes me so sad,” added Erickson. “We never would have expected, and now we have lost two students. Something needs to change.”

The two victims killed in the Dec. 13 shooting have been identified by family members as Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov.

The identity and location of the gunman are still unknown. The FBI announced at the press conference on Monday, Dec. 15, that it would be “offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to the identification, arrest, and conviction of the individual.”

Officials have said that there is no known threat to residents, while also noting that they do not know if the shooter is still in the city or state at this time.