What Most Likely Happened to Alex Pretti
The narrative: federal agents executed a peaceful bystander.
The problem: it makes no sense.
Before we get to what probably happened, let’s talk about what everyone has already decided happened—without evidence, without investigation, without trial. Politicians have issued their verdicts. The media has rendered judgment. The rope is already being fitted. Who needs due process?
Let’s slow down and apply basic logic.
The Motive
There isn’t one.
The execution narrative requires you to believe that career federal agents decided to murder a random citizen in broad daylight. On a public street. With witnesses everywhere. With multiple people filming on their phones. Knowing every second would be captured, analyzed, and broadcast worldwide.
For what? Because they were “pissed off”? Because he was holding a phone?
These are law enforcement officers with families, mortgages, pensions, careers. They know how this works. They know they’d face murder charges, prison time, destroyed lives. And for what benefit? What’s the motive?
There isn’t one. “They’re Nazi stormtroopers” isn’t a motive. It’s a cartoon.
The Sequence
If agents wanted to kill Pretti, why wrestle him to the ground first?
Watch the timeline the media themselves published. Seven agents swarm him. They struggle. They restrain him. One agent removes a gun from near his hip. Then—and only then—another agent fires.
If execution was the goal, why the prolonged struggle? They had weapons drawn. They had overwhelming numbers. They could have shot him the moment he approached. Why spend precious seconds wrestling an armed man to the ground, disarming him, and only then shooting?
Here’s the thing: wrestling him to the ground actually eliminates their legal defense. If they wanted to kill him and get away with it, the smart play is to shoot him while he’s standing, while he could plausibly be reaching for his weapon, while they can claim they were in immediate danger. Once he’s on the ground with seven agents on top of him, the “imminent threat” justification evaporates.
No cop planning a murder would restrain the target first. That’s insane. It only makes sense if they were trying to control the situation, not end a life.
The sequence makes no sense as a murder. It makes perfect sense as a situation that spiraled out of control.
The Response
Even the Times’s own timeline—framed as sympathetically as possible—shows this wasn’t a man standing peacefully with his hands up.
According to their account: Pretti “tries to put himself between the D.H.S. agent and the two civilians.” He gets pepper-sprayed. “Several agents grab Mr. Pretti.” “Additional agents approach and try to pin Mr. Pretti to the ground.” He’s “surrounded by a group of seven agents, some of whom have wrestled him to the ground.” They’re holding him “down on his knees” while “another agent strikes Mr. Pretti repeatedly with a pepper spray canister.”
Was he actively resisting or passively non-compliant? For this analysis, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he inserted himself into an active federal operation while armed, agents responded with force, and in that chaos a gun was discovered on his person.
The Chaos
Now let’s reconstruct what probably happened.
A street confrontation. ICE conducting an arrest. Crowds gathering—this is Minneapolis, where “ICE Watch” networks track and interfere with federal operations. People yelling. Whistles blowing. Horns honking. The chaos that activists have deliberately created around these operations.
Into this walks Pretti. Armed. He inserts himself physically between agents and civilians. Agents don’t know who he is. They don’t know he’s a nurse. They don’t know he has a permit. They see an unknown man interfering with their operation.
They move to restrain him. A struggle ensues. Seven agents trying to control one man. In the scrum, someone discovers he has a gun.
One agent removes the weapon. In the noise—the yelling, the crowd, the adrenaline—he shouts something. “I’ve got the gun!” or “Gun!” or “He’s armed!”
Another agent, pulse racing, doesn’t hear it clearly. What he hears is: “He’s got a gun.”
A split second later, shots fired.
The Legal Reality
If that’s what happened—and it fits the evidence far better than “execution”—there’s virtually zero chance of a conviction.
Miscommunication in a chaotic, high-stress situation involving an armed individual isn’t murder. It isn’t even manslaughter in most jurisdictions. It’s the kind of tragedy that happens when civilians insert themselves into volatile law enforcement situations—exactly the situations that politicians and activists have been encouraging people to create.
I don’t know what best practices are for these high-stress, chaotic situations—it’s not my expertise. Maybe the agents could have done things differently. Maybe there will be policy reviews and training changes. But none of that will result in murder convictions. The mob isn’t screaming for better training protocols. They’re screaming for blood.
The officer who fired will say he heard a warning about a gun and responded to a perceived lethal threat. In the fog of that moment, with incomplete information and a split second to decide, that’s a defensible shoot. Juries understand this. That’s why officers are rarely convicted even when their judgment is questionable.
The Questions Nobody Asks
If the media were interested in what happened rather than the narrative they’ve already written, they’d be asking:
Did Pretti usually carry a gun, or was this unusual for him?
How did he know there was an ICE operation happening?
Was he at work? Did he leave his shift?
Did he talk to anyone before heading to the scene?
Can you even bring a firearm into a hospital?
These questions, and many possible others, go to intent, planning, state of mind. They’re the first things any detective would ask. Instead, reporters spent fifteen minutes grilling Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino on live television and didn’t ask a single one.
They weren’t trying to find out what happened. They were trying to get an official to admit to something that they had already concluded from their amateur detective brains.
Motives for the Rush to Judgment
The agents have no plausible motive for murder. But the people rushing to convict them? They have plenty.
They lost an election. Democrats lost twice to the same man, and illegal immigration was a major reason why. Voters rejected their approach. That stings.
They’re locked out of power. Until at least the midterms, Democrats have no lever to pull. The White House, the Senate, the House—all out of reach. They’re irrelevant, and they can’t stand it.
They need an issue. Last fall it was ACA subsidies, for which they shut down the government and achieved nothing except to have egg on their face coming into the midterms. Now it’s immigration enforcement. They need something to run on, something to fundraise on, to satisfy their base that they are doing something to stop Trump, something to generate outrage and engagement. Martyrs are useful.
They’ve been inciting this. Politicians have called ICE agents “Nazis” and “stormtroopers.” They’ve celebrated “resistance.” They’ve encouraged interference with federal operations. And not one of them—not one—has told supporters to stay away from active arrests conducted by armed agents doing their lawful jobs. The silence tells you everything.
They can’t admit responsibility. This is the most important one. If Pretti died because politicians and activists encouraged civilians to insert themselves into dangerous law enforcement situations so they could benefit politically, then the blood is on their hands. Not ICE. Not Trump. Theirs.
They will never admit that. So they need the agents to be murderers. They need the execution narrative. Because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing who’s really responsible for this death.
As I’ve written before: this is their version of January 6. Sore losers who can’t accept an election result, creating chaos in the streets, getting people killed—and calling it righteousness.
Motives for the Media
Do we even need to say this? Outrage sells ads. Conflict drives engagement. “Federal agents execute peaceful bystander” gets clicks. “Chaotic situation under investigation” doesn’t.
That’s it. That’s the motive.
The Other Side Is Lying Too
A note on fairness: Secretary Noem and other administration officials rushed to frame their own narrative—calling Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who came to “inflict maximum damage” before any investigation concluded. That’s the Trumpian habit: when accused of wrongdoing, don’t wait for facts, just counterpunch harder. It’s a problem, and it feeds the cycle.
But the administration’s spin doesn’t excuse the media and Democrats from doing the same thing in the other direction. Two sides lying doesn’t make either side truthful. The administration framing Pretti as a terrorist doesn’t make him a martyr. The media framing the agents as executioners doesn’t make them murderers.
Everyone is rushing to narrative. Everyone has motives. And somewhere in the middle, there’s a dead man whose actual story nobody seems interested in finding out.
The Bottom Line
A man is dead. That’s a tragedy. His family is grieving. That deserves respect.
But tragedy isn’t murder. A chaotic situation that went wrong isn’t an execution. And trial by media isn’t justice—it’s a lynch mob with better production values.
Many people won’t accept any of this. They’ve already decided what happened. If the investigation concludes it was a miscommunication, they’ll call it a cover-up. If a jury acquits, they’ll call it a rigged system. If body camera footage supports the agents’ account, they’ll call it edited or incomplete.
Once you’ve decided someone is guilty, evidence becomes irrelevant. Everything that confirms the narrative is proof. Everything that contradicts it is conspiracy.
Everyone has already decided what happened. Politicians, reporters, activists—verdict rendered, no trial necessary. The agents are guilty. The narrative is set. The only thing missing is the rope and a tree.
And it’s not just local officials or cable news pundits. Former presidents Obama and Clinton have joined the chorus. Senators. Governors. The entire apparatus of a political party that lost two elections to the same man and can’t accept why. They’re all part of the lynch mob now—lending their credibility to a verdict reached without evidence, fueling the rage, inciting the next confrontation.
So much for concern about our justice system. Due process, presumption of innocence, trial by jury—apparently these principles only matter when it’s convenient. When the mob wants blood, the mob becomes judge, jury, and executioner. And the people who lecture us endlessly about “democratic norms” and “the rule of law” are leading the charge.
When the next civilian dies at the next ICE operation, remember who sent them there.
Maybe—just maybe—we should wait for an actual investigation before we start fitting nooses.
The Cranky Old Guy writes at mecrankyoldguy.com