“Alex was the sweetest, kindest, gentlest soul you ever met,” Shaukat said.
Shaukat, now a physician and clinical researcher at the Manhattan VA Medical Centre, hired Pretti for a research position.
“He was very bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, he wanted to get into the healthcare field, work with patients and be a nurse,” she recalled.
“He did wonderful. Did his work really well, was a team player.”
After finishing nursing school, Pretti returned to the Minneapolis VA as an intensive care nurse, she said.
“He wanted to serve the veterans, just had a high sense of duty and thought they were a vulnerable group in the country who needed our help,” she said.
During the past year Shaukat moved to New York but still had family in Minneapolis and would visit Pretti.
“He was excited about his future and his work. Being an ICU nurse is tough – it’s pretty intense. But he was looking forward to getting a place, a car,” she said.
Pretti did not talk about politics, she said.
“But when things got brought up, he always stood for people and human rights, helping fellow citizens and just being a good citizen of society and the communities that he lived in,” Shaukat said.
Shaukat described bystanders’ video of the shooting as “horrific. They [federal officers] look like trained militia. Clearly, they’re emboldened.”
Officials at odds
Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans said his investigative team secured a search warrant to examine the crime scene where the fatal shooting occurred but was denied access by federal officials.
Evans said the warrant was “an unusual move in a public area like that. But we did that attempting to have judicial approval to enter the scene to gather evidence.”
Evans said the Department of Homeland Security has not provided state investigators with the names of the federal officers involved in shooting or the federal agents involved in other recent shootings in the state.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (Democrat) said at a news conference that he was thankful there was video documentation of the fatal shooting, saying that the Department of Homeland Security’s description of what took place was “nonsense”.
“Thank God we have video because, according to DHS, these seven heroic guys took on an onslaught of a battalion against them or something. It’s nonsense, people. It is nonsense, and it’s lies.”
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem reiterated the Administration’s view that the victim in the shooting was interfering with law enforcement.
“This individual went and impeded their law enforcement operations, attacked those officers, had a weapon on him, and multiple dozens of rounds of ammunition, wishing to inflict harm on these officers,” Noem said in a news conference.
“These agents took actions to defend their lives,” she said later.
Far from the border
Over the past few months, US Border Patrol has been playing an increasingly visible role in immigration enforcement in the interior of the US, far from the border regions where they are typically deployed.
That’s prompted concern from current and former DHS officials, who note that those agents are accustomed to confronting cartels and illegal border crossings rather than protesters in urban areas.
The tactics of Border Patrol agents, including their use of teargas to disperse demonstrators, came under scrutiny in Chicago after the administration launched “Operation Midway Blitz” last year as part of the president’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
– Marianna Sotomayor, Caroline O’Donovan and Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.
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