Survivor alum Eva Erickson has revealed she avoided the deadly shooting at Brown University by mere minutes.
A shooter dressed in all black killed at least two people and hurt nine others Saturday afternoon at the Ivy League school where Erickson, 25, is a doctoral candidate. Hours after the shots were first fired, Erickson shared an update to Instagram from the terrifying scene.
“I am safe,” Erickson initially said on social media. “Yes, my office at Brown is in the building of the shooting, but I was very lucky; I left my lab 15 minutes prior to the active shooter alert.”
She shared a video update while she was under lockdown at the Rhode Island university’s athletic center, revealing that a random impulse decision led her to leave the affected building just five minutes before the shooter walked in and opened fire.
“I am so so extremely lucky that I was very unproductive at work today,” Erickson said. “I randomly decided I would go to the gym — I never go to the gym in the afternoon.”
She explained: “I was leaving the building within five minutes of the shooter coming in.”
Erickson said she left the building at around 4 p.m., before the shooter reportedly opened fire at Barus & Holley Engineering at 4:05 p.m. Brown University issued an emergency alert to students at 4:22 p.m.
In another update shared Sunday, Erickson revealed she had left the gym’s lockdown with other PhD students at around 1:30 a.m., while undergraduates were released from lockdown at around 2:30 a.m. She said that being on the school’s campus the next day felt eerie as students fled the school after the tragedy.
“Everybody is leaving,” she said. “Everyone is trying to get the hell away from Brown to get home to their families, where they can feel safe.”
Erickson said that while she prepared to leave campus, she had to drive past her office building where the shooting occurred.
“The door that I’d exited mere minutes before the shooter would have entered was covered up, boarded off, crime scene tape all around the building, still a lot of police presence,” she recalled.
She captioned the post, in part: “I, just like everyone else at Brown, am processing a lot of emotions relating to the situation. I hope this gives you a window into what we are experiencing. This can’t keep happening to our students.”
Erickson competed on season 48 of Survivor and finished as the runner-up to the $1 million prize. She was the first openly autistic competitor on CBS’s reality show.
As of Monday morning, the shooter who killed two at Brown over the weekend has not been caught. A person of interest who was first taken into custody was released less than 24 hours after the shooting.
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