Alex Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse at a Veterans’ Affairs hospital in Minneapolis. One of his colleagues there told the New York Times that the “default look on his face was a smile.”
Now he’s dead at the age of thirty-seven — the same age as Renee Good, who was murdered a little over two weeks earlier in the same city. Both were American citizens. Both were shot to death by federal agents in the streets of Minneapolis while they were unarmed.
Subsequent statements by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE and the Border Patrol, have emphasized that Pretti had a gun on him at the beginning of the altercation. But Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara has said that Pretti, who had no criminal record, had a valid permit to carry the gun. And the video evidence is decisive. He never tried to pull it, and it had already been confiscated before they killed him.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” But this is extraordinarily disingenuous, and not just because openly brandishing guns is very common in protests held by the American right. And even if it had still been on his person when he was shot, it would have been entirely irrelevant. We haven’t repealed the Second Amendment and passed a law mandating that anyone caught with a handgun can be executed on the spot, even if they never draw it.
He was holding neither a gun nor a protest sign but a phone. He was there as a legal observer, using his phone to record what the agents were doing and deter them from committing abuses — a form of civic engagement that’s entirely legal under the First Amendment. The agents only found the gun after he’d been knocked to the ground and brutalized for the crime of trying to help a woman who’d been knocked over and pepper-sprayed near him moments before.
It’s worth emphasizing that we know all this because the…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
