The man fatally shot by a federal Border Patrol officer Saturday morning on a Minneapolis street was described by the Trump administration as a “domestic terrorist,” but friends and family rejected that label.
They say he was merely trying to do what thousands of residents have been doing for weeks—record the actions of federal agents operating in the area as part of an unprecedented immigration enforcement action—when he was killed.
Before the shooting, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, can be seen in widely shared videos as filming federal officers and then being confronted by them. Agents appeared to spray a chemical irritant at Pretti and another person. In the milliseconds before shots were fired, it was less clear what happened during a scuffle in which Pretti was on the ground.
The Department of Homeland Security said the man was shot after he approached officers with a handgun. Amid rounds of gunfire and screams, people who had been observing and filming the federal agents continued to blow whistles and yell at the agents.
Michael and Susan Pretti, Alex’s parents, said Saturday that they were heartbroken and angry.
“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting,” they said in a statement to local media. “He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed.”
U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino said at a press conference Saturday that agents feared for their lives and fired defensively. He portrayed Pretti as someone who “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
“An individual approached U.S. Border Patrol agents with a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun,” Bovino said. “The agents attempted to disarm the individual but he violently resisted. Fearing for his life, and the lives and safety of his fellow officers, a Border Patrol agent fired defensive shots.”
Pretti was pronounced dead with multiple gunshot wounds.
The officer who shot Pretti was an eight-year veteran of Border Patrol, according to federal officials.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Pretti was a legal gun owner with no criminal record, and was believed to be an American citizen. “The only interaction that we are aware of with law enforcement has been for traffic tickets,” O’Hara said Saturday.
As with the shooting death of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer earlier this month, a short distance away from Saturday’s shooting, starkly different narratives spread quickly as graphic videos of Pretti’s shooting were shared online.
Several co-workers who expressed outrage at the shooting said Pretti was currently working as an intensive-care nurse who served veterans.
Dimitri Drekonja posted online Saturday that he was a colleague of Pretti at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where Pretti became an ICU nurse helping to care for the critically ill. In one post, Drekonja expressed anger at Pretti’s killing. “White. Hot. Rage,” he wrote.
In another, Drekonja posted a photo of Pretti smiling that he said was from their time working together while Pretti was in nursing school.
“He had such a great attitude,” Drekonja wrote. “We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together. Will never happen now.”
Pretti graduated from Preble High School in Green Bay, Wis., in 2006, a representative from the Green Bay Area Public School District confirmed. He attended the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts, where he graduated in 2011 with a bachelor of arts in biology, society and the environment, according to a university spokeswoman.
Robert Alver said that Pretti worked with him as a lab technician beginning in 2009 at the University of Minnesota, and did much of the grunt work. Pretti loved the outdoors and had an infectious smile and laugh, Alver recalled. “He was one of the kindest, best people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.”
After college, Pretti took a job at biology startup GeneSegues, which was developing nanoparticles to deliver drugs. There, he spent his days culturing cells and running experiments in a Minneapolis Veterans Affairs laboratory until 2016, when he left GeneSegues but stayed in Minnesota. He was credited for providing technical support to molecular biology research at the University of Minnesota.
“He’s a typical Minneapolis guy,” said Gretchen Unger, who ran GeneSegues when Pretti was there. “He’s the furthest thing from a domestic terrorist, or whatever stupid thing they’ll come up with.”
At the VA, he worked various clinical research jobs before getting licensed and working as a nurse there. He received his nursing license on Jan. 19, 2021, according to state records. He is credited on a research abstract in 2019 for a proposed study on a bacterial infection common in hospital settings.
Jeanne Wiener, one of Pretti’s neighbors in the Lyndale neighborhood of Minneapolis, described the area as “very quiet.”
Wiener said she had known Pretti for around five years and would exchange pleasantries with him over the fence. She said Pretti lived in a condo and had an older dog. “He was just an unassuming, very nice, very gentle person,” Wiener said. Federal records show that Pretti made several donations through the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue between 2016 and 2025.
Saturday’s shooting was the third by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in the past month.
In a message to members Saturday, the president of a Minnesota nurses union, Cami Peterson-DeVries, wrote that the nursing community was grieving. “This message is not about politics,” she wrote. “It is about mourning a life taken too soon and honoring the calling we all share.”
Michael Pretti told the Associated Press that he and his son had discussed protesting two or three weeks ago, and that he told his son to go ahead and protest but not to engage. “And he said he knows that. He knew that.”
Write to Kris Maher at Kris.Maher@wsj.com, Jared Mitovich at jared.mitovich@wsj.com and Neil Mehta at neil.mehta@wsj.com
