Pain, anger, action in Twin Cities after a second fatal shooting by a federal agent
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A federal agent fatally shot a man Saturday morning in Minneapolis, sending the city and the Twin Cities region reeling again just weeks after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Macklin Good amid a massive immigration enforcement surge.
Family members identified 37-year-old Alex Pretti as the man shot and killed Saturday near 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue in the city’s Whittier neighborhood. He was an intensive care nurse and worked for the Minneapolis veterans hospital.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Pretti was armed with a handgun, that a struggle ensued as agents tried to subdue him and that an agent “fired defensive shots.”
Video and eyewitness testimony dispute that account.
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As he appealed for calm, Gov. Tim Walz slammed the DHS claims and said the federal operation that’s gripped the Twin Cities the past six-plus weeks had become a “campaign of organized brutality against our state, and today that campaign claimed another life.”
Walz said the federal government could not be trusted with the investigation of this shooting and that “Minnesota’s justice system will have the last word on this.”
Local officials said Pretti was an American citizen, a resident of Minneapolis and a legal gun owner with a permit to carry.
Video from the scene circulating on social media does not show Pretti pointing a gun or threatening agents.
Gregory Bovino, commander at large for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said that the man later identified as Pretti approached Border Patrol agents with a handgun during their enforcement operation.
Bovino said agents attempted to disarm him “but he violently resisted” and that “fearing for his life,” an eight-year veteran of the Border Patrol shot the man and that medics attempted life saving measures at the scene. He said the man had two ammunition magazines and speculated that he intended to “massacre law enforcement.”
Walz said the federal government had already judged what happened and called the DHS narrative “nonsense” and “lies.”
By early evening, CNN obtained a statement from Pretti’s family that read in part:
"We are heartbroken but also very angry. Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital.
“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”
Calm late afternoon; Frey to ask court for immediate stop to immigration surge
By late afternoon Saturday, a measure of calm had returned to the area.
“The gathering at the scene now is peaceful,” O’Hara said at about 4:30 p.m. To keep it that way, he said the city would set up a “vehicle exclusionary zone” in the area that would be maintained by uniformed Minneapolis police officers and Minnesota Guard members in fluorescent traffic safety vests.
In a statement, the city said vehicle access will be limited to residents, workers and essential needs in the area from Franklin Avenue to W 28th Street, and from Interstate 35W to Pillsbury Avenue.
Frey said he formally asked for the Guard’s presence to aid the city police force. Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt made a similar move earlier in the day for help at the Whipple Federal Building near Fort Snelling, the base of operations for the federal immigration surge, so that she could redeploy deputies to needed areas.
O’Hara pleaded for peaceful protests going forward, noting that some protesters had turned violent earlier in the day. He said firefighters needed an escort to to put out fires and that at one point state and local authorities deployed less-lethal munitions and gas as officers left the scene.
Frey said the city would push for a temporary restraining order Monday that would stop the federal immigration enforcement surge immediately.
Feds shut out BCA from shooting scene
The tension between state and local law enforcement and the federal authorities continued Saturday as it did earlier in the month when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Macklin Good.
Local officials asked the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate, but the BCA said its agents and crime scene personnel were blocked from the scene by Homeland Security. The BCA even took the unusual step of getting a signed judicial search warrant to get access only to be turned away.
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” Drew Evans, the BCA superintendent, told reporters Saturday afternoon. He said state and federal law enforcement have a history together and that he hadn’t seen anything like this in his more than 20 years at the BCA.
He said he’d reached out to the person he was told was the federal commander at the scene but did not get a call back. Evans said it’s his understanding that Homeland Security is in charge of the investigation, and not the FBI.
Evans vowed that his agents would continue the state probe as best they could even though they couldn’t work the scene before it was overrun. He said he’d turn over findings to local prosecutors for review, as the BCA always does, and would share the same information with federal authorities.
The BCA and Hennepin County Attorney’s Office filed a lawsuit late in the day seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent federal authorities “from destroying any evidence” tied to Pretti’s killing.
Earlier Saturday, Minneapolis police Chief Brian O’Hara said local authorities were working with “very limited information” about what happened and “have not been told any official reports of what led up to the shooting,” noting the he’d seen video of the incident circulating online.
“Our demand today is for those federal agencies operating in our city to do so with the same discipline, humanity and integrity that effective law enforcement in this county demands,” he added.
O’Hara called for calm and for protesters to leave the area around 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue, calling the crowd an “unlawful assembly.”
“We understand your frustrations. This is not sustainable,” he said, adding that all Minneapolis officers have been called into duty and that the city has requested help from the Minnesota State Patrol and regional law enforcement.
Speaking alongside O’Hara, Mayor Jacob Frey described video he saw of the shooting as “masked agents pummeling one of our constituents and shooting him to death. How many more Americans have to get badly hurt or die for this operation to end,” he said of the federal immigration enforcement surge.
‘End this operation’
The incident happened just after 9 a.m. near 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue.
The woman who recorded the video said that before the shooting, the man was helping vehicle traffic get around the area where federal agents and observers had started to gather.
“The gentleman I was standing next to was focused on helping people who were coming into Nicollet Avenue understand that they needed to take it slow and helping them get through,” she said, adding that “agents approached us, told us to back up, back up. And I got on the snow bank, and next thing I knew, they shot him.”
Morning video showed an increasingly chaotic scene in bitter subzero weather with authorities deploying tear gas and other chemical irritants as a larger crowd gathered. Vigils are expected across the Twin Cities area Saturday night.
Just after news of the shooting broke Saturday morning, Walz said he’d spoken with the White House. “Minnesota has had it,” he wrote on social media. “This is sickening. The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.”
Minnesota Democratic leaders echoed that sentiment late in the afternoon.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar implored her Republican colleagues in Congress to work with her publicly or behind the scenes to get the Trump administration to end the surge.
“They know that something's wrong when a Hmong elder is pulled out of a house in his underwear and slippers and (agents) figure out about an hour later they got the wrong guy and in fact the guy they were looking for is actually in jail,” she said, referring to a recent incident in St. Paul.
Later Saturday night, one Senate Republican appeared to agree.
“The events in Minneapolis are incredibly disturbing. The credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake,” Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy wrote in a social media post. “There must be a full joint federal and state investigation. We can trust the American people with the truth.”
Klobuchar, who’s filed paperwork to run for governor, said she had warned Trump administration officials that “there would be more deaths” beyond Macklin Good’s killing on Jan. 7.
Saturday’s video again shows “reckless, violent federal agents taking the life of a Minnesotan,” said Democratic U.S. Sen. Tina Smith. “He was a nurse,” she said of Pretti. “All Americans should be outraged.”
This story is part of our live coverage. Go to live updates.
