“They Were Alive. Then They Were Not”

Early this morning my friend Kathleen and I visited the people’s memorial for Alex Pretti at the site of his murder by Border Patrol agents three days ago.

The pictures I share this evening of our visit to this sacred ground are accompanied by some recent writings on both the killing of Pretti and of Renée Good, also murdered by federal agents earlier this month on the streets of Minneapolis.

They were not symbols when they woke up that morning. Renée Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti were Americans moving through ordinary days, trusting that rules still mattered and that authority still carried restraint. They had names, routines, people who expected them home. Whatever arguments came later, whatever justifications were rushed into place, that truth does not change. They were alive. Then they were not.

Their deaths were not accidents. They were not confusion. They were the result of a system that has begun to treat force as efficiency and accountability as optional. Once a government crosses that line, citizenship becomes paperwork and innocence becomes irrelevant. Power stops pausing to think.

What makes this unbearable is not only the loss of two lives, but the speed with which language is bent to explain it away. The careful phrasing. The quiet shifting of blame onto the dead. This is how a republic teaches itself not to feel. This is how violence becomes procedural instead of shocking.

We mourn Good and Pretti because they deserved more time, more care, more restraint from those sworn to protect. But we also mourn something larger. A country that once demanded power answer to law is now asking its people to accept killings as background noise. To scroll past. To move on.

A republic does not collapse in a single moment. It frays. It excuses. It explains. And one day it wakes up realizing that mourning has replaced expectation.

Remember their names. Not as slogans. Not as ammunition. As people. Because a nation that forgets who was lost will eventually forget who it was supposed to be.

– Bruce Fanger
via social media
January 26, 2026

What makes that video so unbearable to watch isn’t only that an ICE agent killed Alex Pretti. It’s that in the middle of being shoved, struck, and repeatedly blasted in the face with chemical spray, his body kept doing one thing: reaching.

Reaching for a woman who had just been knocked down. Reaching for clarity through the burning in his eyes. Reaching to put himself between her and whatever was coming next. You can see that he is disoriented, choking, and staggering but still his instinct is PROTECTION.

He isn’t posturing or trying to be a hero for a camera. He’s trying to focus so he can shield somebody else. His nervous system is under assault, his vision is blurred, his lungs are on fire, and yet his moral center doesn’t collapse inward. It expands outward toward another human being in danger.

Maybe he knew her. Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. But that’s almost beside the point. What the footage shows is a man whose first reflex under state violence was not self-preservation at all costs, but solidarity. Care. The ancient, almost forgotten impulse to say, “you are not going to face this alone.”

That is what makes his killing so devastating. The state didn’t just shoot a protester. It shot someone in the act of trying to protect a woman. It shot a man whose last visible choice was compassion. Whose final posture was not aggression, but guardianship.

And that is the deepest obscenity of the footage. It’s watching a system built on force extinguish a body that was, even in terror, still reaching for love. Damn.

– Stacey Patton
via social media
January 25, 2026

Indigenous people in Minneapolis are very concerned.
And at the center of that concern is a human being.

Alex Pretti was not a symbol.
He was a son.
A family member.
A trusted presence in his community.

He was an ICU nurse – someone whose daily work was keeping people alive in their most fragile moments.
Someone trained to stay calm when bodies are breaking,
to act with care when others are afraid,
to move toward suffering, not away from it.

That matters.

Because when someone who lives a life of care is killed,
the questions do not stop at what happened.
They move toward how power responds when harm is done.

For many people, this may look like a single event –
a moment to analyze, to debate, to file away.

For Indigenous people, it lands differently.

Encounters with armed authority do not live in isolation for us.
They arrive carrying memory –
of patrols and removals,
of borders enforced through force,
of systems that have long decided whose lives are protected
and whose deaths require explanation.

So when force is used,
when official accounts shift,
when video and statements do not align,
our bodies recognize something before our minds do.
This is not fear.
This is memory.

And let me be clear – carefully, and without accusation:

This is not about demonizing law enforcement.
This is not about disorder.
This is not about political sides.

It is about responsibility.

Alex was known as someone who showed up for others.
Someone who believed presence mattered.
Someone whose instinct was to help, to witness, to care.

So when a life like that is lost,
the community has the right – and the responsibility –
to ask for truth that does not bend under pressure.

Indigenous peoples have not always lived under overlapping jurisdictions –
federal, state, municipal –
and when harm happens, accountability too often dissolves in those seams.

We are watching carefully.
Not with rage, but with attention.
Not to inflame, but to understand how power is moving in this moment.

Because safety cannot exist without trust.
And trust cannot exist without truth –
truth that does not change depending on who is speaking.
We are asking for clarity.
For transparency that does not circle back on itself.
For investigations that do not feel pre-written.

This is not radical.
This is relational.

In our teachings, responsibility is carried forward – not deflected.
We call this wâhkôhtowin – the understanding that everything exists in relationship, and that relationship requires care, honesty, and accountability.

We hold space for Alex’s family.
We hold space for those who worked beside him.
We hold space for a community trying to make sense of loss without being rushed past it.

This is shared in good faith.
With firmness, yes – but also with care.

We will continue to watch.
We will continue to speak.
And we will do so in a way that protects life –
especially the lives of those still coming.

Ekosi.
And so it continues.

– Standing Bear Network
via social media
January 26, 2026

We are not okay. But we are still helpers. We still see human. And that is why they will never win.

– Emily Solberg
via social media
January 26, 2026

See also the previous Wild Reed posts on the resistance to the Trump regime’s fascist occupation of Minnesota:
• Omar Fateh: Quote of the Day – December 4, 2025
• Photo of the Day – December 5, 2025
• Susie Hayward on What’s Happening in Minneapolis
• Doing What We Can to Stop Unjust Arrests of Immigrants
• Great Event, Great Sign, Great Nails
• Christmas Eve Musings
• May We Do Likewise
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like” – January 7, 2026
• “It Was Murder”: 12 Powerful Responses to the Death of Renée Nicole Good
• Omar Fateh: “Folks Are Waking Up”
• A Good Faith Appeal and a Grim Response
• Why Minnesota?
• Chris Hedges on ICE: “I Have Seen These Masked Goons Before”
• Steven Donziger: “Let’s Get Real . . . ICE Is a Domestic Terrorist Organization”
• Historian Kyle Dekker: “It’s Not Nazi Ideology We Are Fighting. It’s American”
• Knowing Our Rights
• Mike Figueredo on Why Trump Might Be Pushing the U.S. to the Brink of Collapse
• A “Red Alert Moment for American Democracy”
• Dispatches from Occupied Minnesota
• Marianne Williamson on How to Psychologically Endure This Moment
• What Moral Clarity Looks Like in Minnesota This MLK Day
• Nemik’s Eulogy for Renée Nicole Good
• “It Was Never About Keeping America Safe”
• “ICE Out!”: The Minnesota General Strike – 1/23/26
• “This Was a Flat Out Execution”
• “Organized Sustained Systemic Resistance and Self-Defense Are Our Only Options”
• Honoring Alex Pretti
• George Conway: The Trump Administration Is a “Criminal Organization”
• In the Face of Fascist Lies, MN Governor Tim Walz Sets the Record Straight
• Adam Serwer on How “Every Social Theory Undergirding Trumpism Has Been Broken on the Steel of Minnesotan Resolve”

Images: Michael J. Bayly.