Where the Sidewalk Ends, the Lies Begin: On the Execution of Alex Pretti

He was holding a cellphone in his hand at the time eight agents descended on him and slammed him to the pavement. With six immigration agents on top of him, Alex Pritti could easily have been “Chauvined” to death…if they hadn’t decided to shoot him. He had a holstered gun, which  he had a permit (and god-given right, according to Trump and the NRA) to “open carry.” And that gun was taken from him by an agent who walked away, then they shot him multiple times from only inches away, as many as 10 shots in less than five seconds.

The attempted cover-up happened immediately. As the gang of officers splintered like a fissured atom from Pretti’s prone body after the shots were fired, they turned directly on the crowd who had filmed and screamed in horror at the execution they’d just witnessed. Out came the pepper-spray. Out came the clubs. Out came the guns. They tried to detain witnesses and steal their cellphones. Homicide is a state crime. But DHS, once again, as in the case of Renee Good, blocked the Minnesota state police from investigating the killing of a Minnesota resident and US citizen and the FBI shut down any internal investigation of the shootings. That’s evidence of guilt. It’s also evidence that Cheney’s “Dark Side” tactics aren’t for black sites anymore. They’ve come home to roost against Americans in broad daylight…

Noem, Bovino and Trump were willing to slander the corpse of a man who worked for their own government, providing care for American veterans. A US citizen, born to US citizens. A man with no criminal record, who had committed no criminal act when he was shot, except trying to protect himself and others from being brutalized by masked, federal agents, who were armed to the teeth. They slimed him before they knew anything about him. They vilified him before his blood had even frozen on the sidewalk. They libeled him before they’d even seen the videos of his murder. They smeared him after they saw the videos of his murder. They blamed him because he was blameless. They defamed him to hide their own guilt. A guilt that runs from that sidewalk in Minneapolis to the offices of Border Patrol to the DHS HQ to the White House. The lies, so outrageous, so transparent, are proof of their culpability. 

Then came the lies. He had a gun in his hand and was ready to shoot. He was planning a massacre. He was packed with ammunition. He was a domestic terrorist. He was armed when they shot him. All lies. Lies told by some of the highest-ranking people in the government. Lies that then bled straight into the right-wing media conglomerate. Lies that spread like a mind-eating virus through the 30 percent of the country eager to believe anything Trump and his regime tell them. Lying is about the only manufacturing this regime is capable of.

The lies aren’t even creative. They’re pro forma. They tell them to cloak the impunity given to the murderous agents of the state, who’ve been unshackled from the Constitution and given license to raid and ransack, detain and kill at will. But how long will even the most slavish devotees of this regime be willing to swallow the lies without convulsing from deep-welling nausea?  The right-to-lifers? The evangelicals? The NRA? How much will they tolerate? After all,  federal agents disarmed Alex Pretti, then they shot him. You couldn’t script a more harrowing parable for the NRA’s warnings about the sanctity of gun rights for all these years. Will this heinous killing finally make them turn on Trump? Don’t count on it. Like the Sierra Club, the NRA is more interested in money and access to power, than the issues they raise the money on, and the organization is unlikely to jeopardize its relationship with Trump, one-sided though it might be. Their members, however, may feel differently.

Here’s one way the comparisons of Nazi Germany to MAGA, America fail: Most of the Nazi leadership wasn’t as stupid as the people Trump has surrounded himself with, like Noem, Patel, Homan, and Bondi. He didn’t hire people for their competency but their unthinking loyalty. In fact, he prefers his subalterns to be amoral and incompetent, lacking knowledge of and interest in the laws and organizations they are meant oversee. Hitler purged the SA in the Night of the Long Knives for a reason. While its street thugs were vital to secure power, they were a liability in maintaining it. Trump himself is too vain and insecure to realize the danger lurking within and this may well prove his undoing.

But the people who were on the frigid street that morning to document the know exactly what went down. They heard it. They watched it. They felt it. They smelled the cordite from the gunshots. They saw the blood flow. They saw the agents scattered from what they’d done. They knew who started it. They knew who ended the life of a person who saved lives for a living. Imagine their anger and disgust at hearing their own government tell vile fabrications about what happened. If they lie about this, what won’t they lie about it?

Here’s what happened, according to the affidavit signed by a person who was standing next to Alex Pretti and who was only a few feet away from him when he was gang tackled to the ground and shot on the sidewalk.

It was 8:50 in the morning when she heard a whistle warning that immigration agents were in her Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis. She was part of a community group that had been observing and recording ICE raids and she drove to the nearby intersection of Nicolet Avenue and 26th Street, where she saw a convoy of CBP and ICE cars and numerous agents prowling the street. Some of them were pounding on the windows and trying to pull people of their cars. 

As she parked her car, the witness saw a man helping to move traffic through the immigration agents’ attempted blockade. That man turned out to be Alex Pretti, a VA nurse and rapid responder at ICE raids. She parked her car and went up to Pretti and told him, “I’m going to film and use my whistle.”

Together, Pretti and the witness watched a federal agent throw someone to the ground further up the street. Meanwhile, across the street, masked agents were harassing some protesters, who were shouting at them and blowing whistles. Alex Pretti began filming the interaction with his cellphone. An agent rushed over to them and barked that they needed to move back. The witness slowly retreated to the sidewalk. But Pretti stayed where he was and continued to record the escalating situation in front of him, where agents had started pepper-spraying the two observers. As Pretti moved toward them to render aid, one of the agents roughly pushed a woman to the pavement and then began pepper-spraying all three observers, including Pretti, who, at that point, was holding both hands above his head and still gripping his cellphone–not, as DHS claimed, a gun.

The agent shoved Pretti, who stumbled, then recovered his balance and leaned down to help the injured woman. The agitated agent pepper-sprayed both of them in the face at close range. So much pepper-spray was now in the air that the witness felt her eyes burning. Five more masked agents rushed over. They grabbed Pretti as he was trying to help the woman to her feet and then threw him to the pavement. Five or six agents pinned him to the ground. One of the agents emerged with Pretti’s gun, which had never left its holster, and ran into the street holding it in his hand, as if it were a trophy of war. Then, the witness said, “They just started shooting. They shot him so many times. I don’t know why they shot him. He was only helping. I was five feet away and they just shot him.”

This is an accurate and intimate account of the killing of Alex Pretti. It is corroborated by every video of the murder. It exposes the lies told by people who weren’t there, yet have every motive to lie to conceal their own complicity. In MAGA America, mothers, priests, poets and nurses are now considered “domestic terrorists,” and the masked men who batter, tear-gas and shoot them are “law enforcement.”

In 2014, JoAnn Wypijewski, Kevin Alexander Gray and I edited a book called Killing Travyons: An Anthology of American Violence, which was a chronicle of American police abuses against minorities, especially Blacks. Looks like we’re all Trayvons now. In a span of a few days, Trump’s immigration storm troopers have shot and killed a poet and a nurse. Who will be next? A watercolorist? A pre-school teacher? A manicurist? A T-ball coach?

We live in a country where you can be charged with resisting arrest without having committed a crime to be arrested for. We live in a country where even the most passive acts of defiance and resistance are an excuse to kill you. Blacks and Hispanics and Native people have experienced this since the earliest days of the Republic. Now white Americans of conscience also find themselves in the crosshairs of their own government.

We also live in a country where people, ordinary people, are so revolted by what’s happening that they are willing to go out every day in Arctic temperatures to confront and resist the paramilitary-style forces that are terrorizing their neighborhoods, knowing the kind of violence that might be visited against them.

Alex Pretti was one of those “ordinary” Americans. He didn’t do anything to deserve being assaulted, never mind shot. He did what nurses are trained to do: help someone who had been hurt, a woman gratuitously shoved to the ground and pepper-sprayed by a CBP agent, a woman who had also done nothing to deserve this brutal treatment. Alex Pretti wasn’t the “worst of the worst.” He was the best of the best.