The U.S. citizen fatally shot by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis on Saturday has been identified as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, who worked as an ICU nurse for veterans.
Pretti, 37, was shot dead in the street by federal agents who pepper-sprayed him in the face and then wrestled him to the floor as he filmed an immigration operation on his phone.
Pretti worked as a nurse for the Veterans Health Administration at the Minneapolis VA hospital and earned $90,783 in 2023, per public records. Pretti’s family confirmed to the Associated Press that he worked as an ICU nurse.
Records show he was issued a nursing license in 2021, which remains active through March 2026. He previously attended the University of Minnesota. He was listed as living at an address in South Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Ruth Anway, a nurse in Minneapolis, told the Daily Mail that she worked alongside Pretti “daily for years” at the VA hospital.
”He worked with veterans. He was a really good guy. He definitely did not deserve to get killed,” Anway said.
She said she and Pretti worked together for about six years, and that their connection went back even further, to when he was still in nursing school. Anway said they also partnered on a VA research study earlier in his career.
“As a friend who just saw my friend get killed, I just want to say he was a good guy,” she said, adding that she last saw him a few months ago.
Anway also described Pretti as someone who followed politics closely and stayed on top of current events. “He was always keeping up with the news and always just really well informed about what was going on,” she said. “We would always talk about everything going on in the world.”
Anway said she vividly remembered working alongside Pretti on January 6, 2021, as the U.S. Capitol came under attack. “I remember we were working together and I just looked at him and said, ‘What is going on? This is crazy,’” she said.
She described Pretti as someone who strongly believed in political activism and speaking out against what he saw as injustice, adding that those convictions were why she believed he had been at the scene on Saturday. “I just know he was there because he felt conviction,” she said.
Anway also said Minneapolis felt “really weird right now” amid heightened immigration enforcement.
“I know people who have been deported. People who are making plans to leave, even though they’re here legally. That does not feel like America to me,” she added.
Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, chief of infectious diseases at the Minneapolis VA and a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, said in a Facebook post he had hired Pretti to help recruit for a clinical trial before he moved into ICU nursing.
Drekonja said he loved working with Pretti and remembered him as a “good, kind person” who lived to help others. He wrote that learning of Pretti’s death left him consumed by “white-hot rage,” and accused the people who killed him of executing him.
He also recalled the day-to-day moments that came with the job, saying Pretti was known for his upbeat attitude while caring for critically ill veterans. “He had such a great attitude,” Drekonja wrote, adding that they would talk between patients about finally getting out for a mountain bike ride together—something that “will never happen now.”
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed that Pretti had no serious criminal history before his killing, save for some parking tickets.
The Daily Beast attempted to contact Pretti’s family.
Video footage shared with The Daily Beast in the lead-up to the shooting shows Pretti filming on his phone, directing traffic in the street. A nearby woman is then pinned down by federal agents, as Pretti comes to the woman’s side.
Federal agents then wrestle Pretti to the ground in a chaotic scene, before a Border Patrol agent shoots Pretti.
As some federal agents back away from the scene, with Pretti lying prone in the street, multiple additional gunshots were fired towards his body.
Federal officials said the officer who shot and killed Pretti has been with Customs and Border Protection for eight years.
DHS has claimed that Pretti ambushed federal agents with his gun and “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
O’Hara said that he was a “lawful gun owner with a permit to carry.”
Pretti’s killing marks the second U.S. citizen to be killed at the hands of DHS in Minneapolis this month during “Operation Metro Surge.” Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minnesota mother, was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in her car on Jan. 7.
Good’s killing sparked daily protests in Minnesota and further afield. Pretti’s killing sparked further angry demonstrations in Minneapolis on Saturday.
