CBP Agent Guns Down Minneapolis Nurse: Video Analysis

Meghnad Bose, Rana Roudi, and Ryan Grim break down video obtained by Drop Site showing CBP’s killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti on Saturday.

By Meghnad Bose, Rana Roudi, and Ryan Grim, Drop Site News

On Saturday, U.S. federal agents killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota, shooting him multiple times at point blank range while pinned down prone on the ground and surrounded by officers along Nicollet Avenue. The Saturday killing—committed by a Customs and Border Protection agent—is the third shooting by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP in as many weeks, and comes just one day after tens of thousands of Minneapolis residents took to the streets in subzero temperatures to protest the federal raids in Minnesota.

Close-up video footage, obtained by Drop Site, shows one agent push a person to the ground and then deploy a chemical irritant twice on the 37-year-old Pretti, who had gone to help the person pushed. Around eight agents then swarm and wrestle him to the ground. One of the officers then visibly unholstered his gun and fired multiple close-range gunshots at Pretti, a Minnesota resident who was reportedly on the scene as an observer. There are ten gunshots heard in all—at least five of them were fired at Pretti from a distance, while the person holding the camera shouts, “What the fuck did you just do?”

Video footage obtained by Drop Site with slow-motion video analysis of the January 24th killing of Alex Pretti by a CBP agent.

Another video showing a different angle of the killing also shows federal agents manhandling Pretti once he’s face down on the ground, with one officer appearing to strike him three times just before the gun shots ring out. The angle appears to show one officer approaching Pretti as he’s pinned to the ground, reaching over Pretti’s body with the officer’s hand empty and then walking away with a gun in his hand.