Eva Erickson says she walked out of her office at Brown University just minutes before everything changed.
The Survivor season 48 runner-up revealed that she left the Barus & Holley building roughly 15 minutes before a gunman entered the engineering complex on Saturday, Dec. 13, killing at least two students and injuring several others in a shooting that sent the Ivy League campus into lockdown.
“I am so, so extremely lucky,” Erickson said in a video posted to Instagram. “I was leaving the building within five minutes of the shooter coming in.”
Brown University first alerted students to an active shooter near Barus & Holley shortly after 4 p.m. local time. Erickson, 25, is a Ph.D. candidate in engineering and fluid and thermal science and had been working in her office inside the building until just before the alert was issued.
In a since-expired Instagram Stories post shared Saturday evening, Erickson told followers she was safe, adding that she had “randomly decided” to leave her lab early — a choice she says likely saved her life.
“I was in my office until 4 p.m. and I was like, ‘Man, I’m just not getting anything done,’” she explained in a longer video update filmed later that night. “I put on my coat and randomly decided I would go to the gym. I never go to the gym in the afternoon.”
About 20 minutes after she left, campus alerts began flooding phones.
Erickson said she was inside the gym for several hours as the situation unfolded, before authorities moved students into an athletic center for safety. The mood, she recalled, was heavy and surreal.
“They turned on all the lights, they pulled down all the shades, and everyone kind of sat on the ground,” she said. “Getting tons of texts, calls, calling our parents, telling people we love them.”
Students living off campus were released from lockdown around 1:30 a.m. Sunday morning. Brown University canceled exams in the aftermath of the attack and sent students home early for winter break.
By Sunday, Erickson said the campus felt hollow.
“On campus today has just been so eerie,” she said. “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 two students killed in the shooting have been identified by family members as Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov. Their deaths have shaken the tight-knit Providence campus, particularly among students who never imagined such violence reaching Brown.
“You think this is never gonna happen to you,” Erickson said. “It was never gonna happen on Brown, right? But it did. And it could happen to anyone.”
She expressed gratitude for the Brown community that supported her during and after her time on Survivor, calling the tragedy “so close to impacting me.”
“I’m lucky,” she said. “And not everyone’s that lucky.”
As of Monday, the gunman remains at large. The FBI announced it is offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to the identification, arrest, and conviction of the suspect. Authorities have said there is no known ongoing threat, though they have not confirmed whether the shooter remains in the city or state.
For Erickson, the randomness of survival is what lingers most.
“It just makes me so sad,” she said. “We never would have expected this. Now we’ve lost two students. Something needs to change.”
What began as an unproductive afternoon in the lab ended as a narrow escape — one that left a survivor grappling with grief, gratitude, and the chilling awareness of how close she came to becoming part of the story.
