Alex Pretti, Man Shot By Federal Agents in Minneapolis, Wanted to ‘Make a Difference’

The man fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday morning has been identified as 37-year-old Alex Pretti.   

Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, the city where he lived. He was a keen outdoorsman and biked trails near his home. 

At a news conference on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Pretti was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit to carry a firearm in public and only had a few parking tickets.

Read more: Federal Agents Kill Another Person in Minneapolis Immigration Crackdown

Pretti’s father, Michael, said he wanted to “make a difference in this world.”

“Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital,” he said in a statement shared with several media outlets. 

“Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact,” he added. 

Pretti’s family said he had been motivated to join the protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the killing of another Minneapolis resident, 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, by a federal agent just over two weeks ago.

“He cared about people deeply and he was very upset with what was happening in Minneapolis and throughout the United States with ICE, as millions of other people are upset,” Michael Pretti told the Associated Press. “He felt that doing the protesting was a way to express that, you know, his care for others.”

He said he had a conversation with his son earlier this month in which he told him to be careful while protesting.

“We had this discussion with him two weeks ago or so, you know, that go ahead and protest, but do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically,” Michael Pretti said. “And he said he knows that. He knew that.”

Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, a former colleague of Pretti’s at the VA Hospital, described him as “a kind person who lived to help.”

“He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together,” Drekonja said in a post on BlueSky. “Will never happen now,” he added. 

Born in Illinois, Pretti graduated from Preble High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 2006. He went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 2011, before attaining a nursing license. 

Pretti worked with veterans at the VA hospital and was devoted to his patients. Mac Randolph told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that Pretti cared for his father, Terry Randolph, in his final days in December 2024.

“He spent three, four days in the ICU and explained everything that would happen when they turned off the oxygen,” he told the Tribune. “He was as compassionate a person as you could be.”

Randolph told the story of how Pretti took his father, an Air Force veteran, on an “honorary walk” around the facility on his gurney after he passed, draped in an American flag.

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

In a video shared on social media by Mac, Pretti can be seen reading a final tribute to Terry Randolph, who passed away at 77.

“Today, we remember that freedom is not free,” Pretti says in the video. We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it.”