Minneapolis, MN – Federal agents shot and killed a man in the Whittier neighborhood of South Minneapolis after he tried to render aid to a woman who had just been maced.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, was shot nearly 10 times while laying on the side of Nicollet Avenue after seven agents wrestled him to the ground. 

A crowd formed in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, which quickly led to chaos as agents deployed chemical weapons without warning. Streets were barricaded and businesses along the stretch of Nicollet Avenue opened their doors to protesters to take shelter from tear gas.

The killing occurred shortly after 9 a.m. on Jan. 24, a little more than just two weeks after the ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good. Good’s killing, which the Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled a homicide on Jan. 23, has sparked near daily protests in the city.

Pretti, a south Minneapolis resident and University of Minnesota alum, was a beloved intensive care nurse with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey led a press conference at noon, describing what he saw in the video as “more than six masked agents pummeling one of our constituents and shooting him to death.”

“A great American city is being invaded by its own federal government,” Frey said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s narrative, posted to X shortly after agents killed Pretti, differed dramatically from what was visible in the footage taken by observers. Similar to Good’s killing, federal officials immediately called the victim a “domestic terrorist.”

According to DHS, Pretti approached agents with a handgun. As the agents tried to disarm him, he “violently resisted.”

“Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots,” the department posted on its X account. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

Notably, Pretti was not visibly brandishing a handgun in the multiple angles of the shooting currently available. Instead, he is seen holding his smartphone, filming federal agents as a legal observer.

A different angle of the shooting appeared to show a federal agent running away from the scuffle with Pretti’s firearm in hand, moments before other agents shot him. In another angle, Pretti’s hands are empty, being held by multiple agents. See Bellingcat’s investigatory findings here and Drop Site News’ breakdown here. Another analysis shows that after disarming Pretti, an agent running away from the scene accidentally discharged the weapon prior to other agents opening fire. Another analysis is here.

President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to continue spreading the narrative supplied by DHS. Four hours after the shooting, Trump claimed in a post that Frey and Governor Tim Walz were responsible for the killing because of their “pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric!”

“The Mayor and the Governor are inciting Insurrection,” Trump wrote.

In a press conference, Walz referred to the DHS narrative as “nonsense.”

“What I see with my eyes and what you’re going to see with your eyes makes that pretty hard to believe,” he said. “I’ve seen the videos from several angles, and it’s sickening.”

Federal officials tried to prevent Minneapolis police officers from accessing the scene of the killing, Police Chief Brian O’Hara told CNN. Similarly, federal agents prevented local officials from participating in the review of Good’s killing earlier this month.

After the killing as throngs of community flocked to the scene screaming “shame” and “ICE out,” barricades were erected and fires were started.

The amount of residents that continued to show up was too much for the authorities to handle, even with State Patrol and Conservation officers, Minneapolis Police, and federal agents. After unleashing countless rounds of tear gas and crowd control munitions in the subzero temperatures, injuring dozens of people and making several arrests, community stood tall and defiant, calling for ICE to leave the state. Outnumbered, authorities vacated the area.

Later in the day, the City of Minneapolis announced that the entire area surrounding the site of the shooting, from Franklin Avenue to West 28th Street and from I-35W to Pillsbury Avenue, was being restricted.

MPD officers and National Guard are now stationed at select entry points, prohibiting vehicle access to residents and workers, in a move to prevent the entry of “materials for barricades or fires that could further disrupt or harm the neighborhood.”

Thousands attended a vigil for Pretti in the Whittier neighborhood and the community continues to hold space around the site of the killing.

In two new court filings adding to the class action lawsuit against the constitutional violations occurring during the federal Operation Metro Surge, witnesses describe what they saw. On both, names are redacted to protect the privacy of these individuals, one of whom was verbally threatened by federal agents already.

One of them is a declaration from a witness and the other is from a physician who was allowed to do CPR on Pretti as he was dead.

The Hennepin Country Attorney’s Office and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (MN BCA), represented by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent destruction of evidence in the Alex Pretti killing. A temporary restraining order (TRO) was also filed.

By the end of the day, Trump appointee U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud, granted the TRO and ordered the federal government not to destroy or alter evidence in the Pretti killing. See a round up of the legal updates from today.

---

Follow us on X (aka Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky and Patreon.

Please consider a tax-deductible donation to help sustain our horizontally-organized, non-profit media organization:

---

Click the image to see all UR coverage of federal law enforcement operations in MN.

Watch Unicorn Riot’s videos from ICE in Minneapolis in playlist below.