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

Pretti is the second Minneapolis resident to be fatally shot by federal agents in January, following Renee Good, also 37, who was shot on Jan. 7. The latest incident has compounded an already tense standoff between federal government officials who say both people killed 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.

At a news conference, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Pretti, whose name at that point had not been released, had only some parking tickets on his record.

O’Hara said Pretti was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit to carry a firearm in public, a fact that was later repeated by Gov. Tim Walz. Attorney General Keith Ellison later confirmed that Pretti was the man killed in the incident.

Pretti 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 when his unit was rung, nor did his three neighbors. Someone in an upstairs unit waved reporters away before closing the blinds. An “Abolish Ice” sign hung in the window.

Records show that Pretti attended the University of Minnesota. His LinkedIn page notes that he was a “junior scientist” at the University of Minnesota Medical School starting in 2012. State records show Pretti was issued in 2021 a license to be a registered nurse, and it remains active through March 2026.

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 Minnesota 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.”

Drekonja noted that the VA hired Pretti to help recruit for a research study prior to when he earned his nursing degree in 2021. Working together on that close-knit team jumpstarted a friendship that revealed a shared love of mountain biking, he said.

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.”

Mac Randolph was watching news coverage and saw that the person who was shot was the nurse who was with Randolph’s father in his final days at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System, in December 2024.

“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.

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

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

While not identifying Pretti as the man who was killed, Walz said at a news conference Saturday that the man was a Minnesota resident and “all of us understand what happened this morning and the tragedy of it.”

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.”

“There will be justice for Minnesotans,” Walz added.

———

(Abby Simons, Deena Winter and Chloe Johnson of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this report.)

———

©2026 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC