Alex Pretti identified as man fatally shot by federal officers in Minneapolis

Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse from south Minneapolis and a U.S. citizen, was fatally shot by federal agents during an immigration enforcement action in Minneapolis on Jan. 24.

Pretti is the second Minneapolis resident to be fatally shot by federal agents in January, following Renee Good, also 37, who was killed on Jan. 7. The latest incident has compounded an already tense standoff between federal government officials who say both people slain were interfering with federal agents doing their jobs, and local leaders who say the heavy federal presence is causing violence and chaos in the city.

Reporters with the Minnesota Star Tribune reached two members of Pretti’s immediate family as news of the incident was still spreading. His sister fought back sobs on the phone before hanging up.

In a statement provided to CNN on Saturday night, his parents, Michael and Susan Pretti, praised their son as a “kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse.”

“Alex wanted to make a difference in this world,” his parents said. “Unfortunately he will not be with us to see his impact.”

They said the Trump administration and federal officials are saying “sickening lies” about their son and that his last act was a heroic one, to protect a woman while being pepper-sprayed by ICE agents.

“Please get the truth out about our son,” they said. “He was a good man.”

Pretti, who worked at the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center, lived in a fourplex on Garfield Avenue in a quiet south Minneapolis neighborhood about a mile and a half southwest of where he was killed.

No one answered at his apartment, nor at his three neighbors’. Someone in an upstairs unit waved reporters away before closing the blinds. An “Abolish Ice” sign hung in the window.

Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, a friend and colleague of Pretti’s from the Minneapolis VA, described Pretti as a caring and funny ICU nurse who treated the hospital’s most critically ill veterans.

“He was a kind, friendly, jokey person,” Drekonja told the Star Tribune. “Regardless of which hospital you’re in, taking a job in the ICU, it means that you’re up for a challenge, and it means you’re confident in your skills — because you’re going to see the sickest people in the hospital, and some of your patients are going to die. You’re going to have to have the personal skills with family; you’re going to have the technical skills to try to keep their loved one alive.

“He was great at it.”

They never discussed Pretti’s political thoughts on immigration enforcement or gun ownership, but Drekonja said he was not surprised to learn that Pretti was out protesting ICE activity, given that the city “is in a pretty dark place.”

The videos of his killing are difficult to stomach, Drekonja said.

“I see a guy trying to help. I see him underneath many, many bodies, and then I hear gunshots go off,” he said. “Others will pore over this far more, with better equipment than I have, but it’s really gutting.

“He was the type of person you really want to have as a friend or a neighbor.”

The University of Minnesota confirmed Pretti was a 2011 graduate of the College of Liberal Arts. His LinkedIn page notes that he was a “junior scientist” at the University of Minnesota Medical School starting in 2012, but the university said he was no longer employed there at the time of his death. State records show Pretti was issued in 2021 a license to be a registered nurse, and it remains active through March 2026.

“He spent three, four days in the ICU and explained everything that would happen when they turned off the oxygen” being supplied to 77-year-old Terry Randolph. “He was as compassionate a person as you could be.”

Mac Randolph explained how they had “this honorary walk” for his father, draped in an American flag.

Terry Randolph was given a last lap around the facility, and “every doctor and nurse came out and saluted” as Pretti pushed the Air Force veteran on a gurney.

“You could see that it wasn’t the first time he had done that,” Mac Randolph said.

Dr. Julia Grigoriev, a hospitalist at the Minneapolis VA who worked alongside Pretti regularly, described him as “class clown” who lightened the mood in every room he entered.

Working in an ICU takes a unique skillset, she added: “You have to have guts. You have to have balls. You have to be very stoic but also have humor, else it’s hard to survive. He was all of the above.”

Grigoriev vehemently rejected the narrative by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that Pretti came to the area seeking to commit violence against federal law enforcement Saturday.

“Bullshit,” she said, denouncing those seeking to malign his character. “I would never believe that Alex would want to harm anybody.”

Pretti graduated in 2006 from Preble High School in Green Bay, Wis., said district spokeswoman Lori Blakeslee.

“I’ve been chatting with the administrators, and we’re pretty devastated,” she said.

Just moments earlier, Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino said at a news conference that the man who was killed “wanted to do maximum damage to agents.”

Walz rejected that as a false narrative.

“Thank God we have video,” Walz said. “It’s nonsense, people. It’s nonsense, and it’s lies.”

He rejected the rush to judgment by federal officials and said, just like the shooting of Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7, that a full state investigation into the killing was needed and would be done.

“They already will slander this individual,” Walz said. “They already have made this the case. But you will all start to see it, some of you probably have, there are multiple angles [of this shooting]. And I’ll go back to what we talked about before. They’re telling you not to trust your eyes and ears. Not to trust the facts that you’re seeing.