Alex Pretti spat on federal agents and attacked their vehicle in a confrontation days before he was fatally shot, a new video shows.
In two videos published on Wednesday, Pretti was seen on Jan. 13 within a crowd of protesters behaving belligerently toward federal agents. He can be seen daring agents to attack him, spitting on them, then kicking out the taillight on their vehicle.
“Assault me, motherf***er!” the man, presumed to be Pretty, shouted at agents, moving as if he was about to lunge at them.
When the officers declined to engage, he got closer and spat at them. As they began to drive away, he kicked out the taillight on their vehicle, causing them to get back out and scuffle with him. After bringing him to the ground, he was held down for about 20 seconds, after which the agents got back up and left without him.
Pretti was mostly wearing the same clothes as on his fatal encounter with Border Patrol agents days later, and his gun could be seen as well, though located in a more concealed spot on his waistband. The officers didn’t show any indication that they saw the gun during the encounter.
The videos expanded the dialogue around the shooting of Pretti, with differing perspectives. The primary takeaway was that Pretti was involved in protests well before his death, and wasn’t an apolitical bystander caught in the path of a law enforcement operation by chance during his fatal encounter.
Critics of Pretti held up the video as evidence of a pattern of belligerent behavior against federal agents from the ICU nurse. His defenders argued that the videos were irrelevant to the circumstances surrounding his death, which came after he became involved in a federal immigration operation he was recording.
“A week before Alex was gunned down in the street — despite posing no threat to anyone — he was violently assaulted” by federal agents, Steve Schleicher, a lawyer for Pretti’s family, said in a statement. “Nothing that happened a full week before could possibly have justified Alex’s killing.”
Operations in Minnesota have been receiving heightened attention after the death of Renee Good earlier this month. Criticism of the federal presence exploded after Pretti’s killing, partially due to the initial reactions of some within the Trump administration, in which they claimed he was trying to assassinate federal officers, a claim quickly dispelled by video evidence and walked back.
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Some left-wing conspiracy theorists claimed that Border Patrol put him on an assassination list over the Jan. 13 encounter. Several of the claims went viral on social media.
Many, if not most, assaults on Border Patrol and ICE personnel that don’t cause serious physical harm go unreported internally due to the perceived annoyance of extra paperwork the reports require. Pretti’s Jan. 13 encounter was with ICE agents, while his fatal encounter was with Border Patrol. ICE and Border Patrol’s reporting metrics don’t communicate with each other.