Alex Pretti’s Mother Urges Americans to Remember Her Son’s Memory—Even if the Government Won’t

It’s been six months since Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents conducting ICE operations in Minneapolis—and still, his mother says, no one has been held accountable for the injustice. 

“Six-months of pain, a roller coaster of trauma over and over,” Susan Pretti wrote in a devastating open letter on Instagram. “Every time another a death, another mention, a picture, a tribute, a sorrow so deep.” 

Pretti was a 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen employed by the Department of Veteran Affairs. He’d been filming protesters blowing whistles around masked border patrol agents in January when he saw one of them pushed by an officer. Videos of the event show him intervening, whereafter he was tackled by five more agents, one of whom repeatedly hit his head with a metal object. In footage, captured from various angles, federal agents appear to remove a gun from his waistband, with someone warning also “he’s got a gun”—though Pretti never actually appears to reach for it. After being hit with multiple shots, Pretti was killed on January 24, 2026. Per documents reviewed by ProPublica, the two agents that fired the shots were identified in government records as Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez. 

“No-one has been held accountable, no apologies, not a single phone call from any governmental official, hospital personnel, or the Mpls police dept,” Pretti’s mother writes in her letter. “Will I ever be able to enjoy life again? How does one living knowing that I have no power to change what has happened?”  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Susan P (@suzpretti)

 

Pretti’s death followed weeks after the death of Renee Nicole Good, who was also fatally shot by federal agents, also in January, also in Minneapolis. The two also faced the same postmortem treatment by the Department of Homeland Security as being labeled “domestic terrorists,” as well as probes into their deaths that seemed deliberately inept by the Civil Rights Division (CRT), typically in charge of such investigations. (It was for a refusal to open a probe into Good’s death that at least four top CRT officials resigned from the DOJ.)

In March, CBS reported that the CRT picked Brandon Wrobleski—an employee at the office’s employment litigation section, and thus with no actual experience with any federal criminal cases—to handle a probe into Pretti’s death. Multiple sources confirmed to the outlet that Wrobleski was—since then—meant to be working with two local prosecutors at the Minneapolis U.S. Attorney’s Office. 

This is not the first time Pretti’s parents have spoken out about his death. Speaking to the New York Times in February, Susan said “there was no reason he should have died that day.” Michael, Pretti’s father, added, “His last act on this earth, his last thought, was to help this woman.” 

It appears the family has still reached no answers since—a reality underscored by Pretti’s mother’s letter. “For all you asking what you can do,” she wrote, “continue this fight.”