The woman Alex Pretti was protecting is an EMT.
The woman Alex Pretti was protecting is an EMT. He died alone on the pavement because ICE stopped her from being with him in his final moments.
This week, new reporting added a detail that turns an already horrifying Minneapolis killing into something even darker. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was filming federal immigration activity when he saw an officer shove a woman to the ground.
Pretti stepped between them, trying to protect her. Within moments, he was sprayed with chemical irritant, swarmed by multiple agents, pinned down, and then shot as people screamed and cameras rolled.
The woman Pretti defended has now said she is an emergency medical technician, and she says she was physically restrained by a masked agent when she tried to help him.
In an exclusive interview reported by The Intercept, the EMT said she could tell immediately that Pretti had a catastrophic brain injury. She says she identified herself, begged to perform CPR, and pleaded to get to him. On the audio in the video, her voice can be heard calling out “decorticate posturing,” the involuntary curling that can signal severe brain trauma. She says an agent held her back anyway.
Read that again: the person he tried to shield was trained to save lives, and federal agents would not let her get to him. Whatever you think about immigration policy, whatever you think about protest, whatever you think about “crowd control,” this is a basic human line.
When someone is critically injured in front of you, you do not block medical care. You do not force them to bleed out while an EMT is begging to help.
Pretti’s death was later ruled a homicide by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, meaning it was caused by another person, not an accident. The moral point is not complicated: if the government shoots someone and then prevents aid, it is not just using force. It is asserting control over whether someone lives long enough to be treated.
And the law is not silent here. Once the government has someone under its control, it has a duty not to be deliberately indifferent to serious medical needs. Xavier de Janon of the National Lawyers Guild put it plainly: the state is responsible for keeping a person in its custody alive and cared for, and it can be liable if it fails.
This is the story of what impunity looks like in real time. It is not abstract. It has a name, a job, a body on the ground, and an EMT held back with her hands empty.
Share this. Say his name. Demand independent investigations. Demand an end to ICE. Period.