In a first video, the victim, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, is seen confronting police officers. ICE in the middle of the street during an operation while recording with his phone, although the man retreats when pushed by one of the officers.
In another, he is seen – always recording with the phone in his right hand – indicating to a driver to proceed, while two other citizens confront immigration agents and blow the whistle, something that has become common in the city to alert residents about the large-scale raids against migrants ordered by the Government of President Donald Trump.
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READ: Minnesota governor denounces “another atrocious shooting” by US federal agents
At one point, an officer pushes one of those two citizens, who falls to the ground, and Pretti tries to get in the way to protect this person from the pushes.
At that moment the agent gasses Pretti and the other two civilians and the nurse tries to shield the person fallen on the ground.
It is then that several agents surround Pretti and struggle with him before shooting him on more than one occasion when he is on the ground.
The Department of Homeland Security, in charge of immigration operations, has assured that Pretti was carrying a semi-automatic weapon. and chargers and the Secretary of Homeland Security herself, Kristi Noem, assured in a press conference that the victim “attacked the agents” with “the intention of causing harm” and that he was “brandishing” the weapon.
However, None of the videos posted so far on the Internet show Pretti in any of the various shots with any weapon.
In one of the videos it appears that one of the immigration agents snatches a weapon very similar to the one that the Department of Homeland Security said it had seized from Pretti (a 9-millimeter semi-automatic Sig Sauer) seconds before the shooting begins.
Pretti’s death intensified the protests and displays of indignation multiplied in Minneapolis.
Noem assured that the Federal Government is investigating what happened and that it will not collaborate with the authorities of the state of Minnesota (where Minneapolis is located) or its governor, Tim Walz, whom she said cannot be trusted.
Hours earlier, Walz assured that he would not allow the federal authorities to exclusively investigate what happened, as happened with the death less than three weeks ago in Minneapolis of a woman, Renee Good, shot by an officer of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE).
Pretti, born in the state of Illinois, studied nursing at the University of Minnesota. Photo: composition
The large-scale raids in Minneapolis – which has seen the arrival of five times the number of federal agents than the city’s entire police force – were ordered by the administration of US President Donald Trump in early January, when a conservative YouTuber’s documentary brought cases of federal funds misappropriated by daycare centers run by members of the Somali community back into focus.
