“WTF have you done?”
Caught on tape, that anguished cry from an eyewitness to Alex Pretti’s death on a Minneapolis sidewalk last week eerily echoes the tragic wails from the scene of Renee Good’s shooting death a couple of weeks earlier, about a mile away.
Aside from the chorus of horrified witnesses to their deaths at the hands of federal agents, deaths now seen by millions, both Alex and Renee were 37-year-old Minnesotans, both U.S. citizens killed because they cared deeply for the immigrants being swept up by ICE in the massive federal enforcement effort that has shattered the peace in this community, as it did earlier in Chicago and Los Angeles.
Alex Jeffrey Pretti was an ICU nurse and a gun-carrying activist who brought his concealed/carry, licensed 9 MM semi-automatic to the fatal run-in with ICE. There is no evidence from the myriad phone videos of the event that Preti ever drew the weapon, or even whether the agents spotted it before they opened fire in a fusillade of as many as 10 shots.
It should have never happened, and the gun is part of a massive federal investigation. Like hundreds of his friends and neighbors,
Alex turned out on the frosty streets of Minneapolis to protest the massive immigration sweep that has shattered the community, resulting in scores of arrests, numerous people roughed up, teargassed and pepper-sprayed, deportations, detainments, children separated from their parents, and a rift with the federal government that will likely take a generation to heal.
When I was a kid growing up on Long Island, and then later in Brooklyn Law School, the federal government was the good guy when it came to civil rights, housing, education, and integration. It was the feds who comforted the needy or storm-tossed.
Immigration was never much of an issue. Folks came from their native lands, passed through Ellis Island, or some other port of entry, legal or illegal, formal or informal, and by the second generation became Americans, regardless of who they were when they got here.
Now immigration has become a scorching issue that has cleaved the country. Indeed, based on the same exact video evidence, whether you see Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s deaths as justifiable or criminal is probably a function of whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, liberal or conservative, your age, and especially how you feel about President Donald J. Trump.
While acknowledging the tragedy of their deaths, most pro-Trumpers, at least those I speak with, including cops, believe the deceased caused their own deaths by resisting arrest. It has become an ideological Rorschach test. “She tried to run down the officer.” “He had a gun and pockets full of ammo.”
Calling the death “a heartbreaking tragedy” and “a wake-up call,” President Barack Obama claims more explosively that those in the Trump administration “seem eager to escalate the situation.” He adds that the deaths of Alex and Renee “appear to be directly contradicted by video evidence.”
Nothing I say here is likely to change the minds of those who have followed the chaos and carnage in Minneapolis. Your mind is made up, as is mine.
“You know what you saw,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz at a press conference Sunday. Extolling the virtues of Alex and Renee and calling for a full, fair investigation, Gov. Walz put it simply, “What side do you want to be on?”
