Are You Okay?

An ICU nurse, a burst of gunfire, and the story power tells after it kills.

The cold in Minneapolis doesn’t just sting, it instructs. It teaches you what matters, because you can’t carry everything. You keep what’s essential. You keep what’s warm. You keep what keeps other people alive. That’s why the detail won’t leave me alone: an ICU nurse, a man whose whole job is to stand between strangers and death, ending up on the pavement in the same city where people have already learned the names of bodies like they’re learning a new alphabet.

And in the middle of all the noise, sirens, shouting, boots on ice, there’s this whisper of a story moving person to person: that his last words weren’t about himself. That they were a question. That he looked toward the woman he was trying to protect and asked her, “Are you okay?” as federal officers sprayed him in the face with pepper spray and beat him.

I know why that sentence lands in the chest with the heavy familiarity of something we’ve seen before: not because we crave myth, but because we recognize the shape of it, because we’ve watched people like that, in moments like that, think of someone else first.

On January 24, 2026, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, 37, in Minneapolis. The Department of Homeland Security said he approached Border Patrol officers with a 9mm handgun and resisted disarmament; local officials disputed aspects of that characterization, and video circulating online appears to show him holding a phone, with no weapon visible in his hands. New reporting indicates that the weapon Pretti was legally carrying was removed from its holster by a federal agent and possibly discharged at that time, by the agent, which spooked the other agents involved, potentially triggering the preceding gunfire. What the videos and accounts suggest is a nightmare of seconds: a man who spent his working life keeping other people alive ends up on cold pavement, pinned and struck, while the simple act of disarming him becomes the fuse.

Reports describe an agent taking Alex Pretti’s pistol, turning to run, and a single crack of gunfire ringing out, an instant that can flip fear into reflex, and reflex into tragedy. In policing research, hearing gunfire from peers dramatically increases the likelihood that officers will fire too: contagious fire, panic spreading through sound before anyone has time to think. If that first shot was an accidental discharge, the horror is not only that bullets flew, but that one negligent pop, one startled assumption, may have cascaded into a fatal volley.

And this is where “training” stops being an abstract talking point and becomes the difference between restraint and catastrophe. DHS policy is explicit that its law-enforcement components are supposed to train for de-escalation, sound judgment, and responsible force, because the job isn’t just how to shoot, it’s how not to. ICE describes an academy pipeline that includes firearms work and de-escalation, with basic training reported as an eight-week program at FLETC. But “trained” can still be the wrong kind of trained: preparation built for targeted enforcement operations can fail in the chaos of a city street, amid yelling, running, cameras, and adrenaline, especially if deployments scale faster than experience, supervision, and specialized crowd-control skills can keep up.

If an unintentional shot truly set off the chain, then the question isn’t only who fired.

It’s what systems allowed a seized weapon to be handled unsafely in public, and what command, discipline, and judgment failed to slow the trigger-pulling once fear took over. Public-order policing is its own craft, protest dynamics, disciplined formations, clear command-and-control, and the hard-earned skill of not letting panic set the tempo. DHS itself offers specialized “Field Force Operations” instruction that explicitly trains crowd-control methods, mass-arrest procedures, and riot-control formations, proof that this isn’t generic law enforcement. And history shows what happens when agencies surge into unrest without that preparation: a DHS Inspector General review of the 2020 Portland deployment found that although operations were “mainly focused on riot and crowd control,” only 7 of 63 reviewed officers had riot/crowd-control training. That isn’t the story of one split-second mistake. That’s leadership deciding that close-enough training is close enough for city streets, and then acting surprised when the street answers back in blood.

After Renée Good was killed, Minneapolis didn’t just grieve; it ignited. Protests swelled, skirmishes intensified, and the city slid into that tense, sleepless posture where everyone is bracing for the next headline and the next video. And in that moment, streets already raw, fear already primed, the Trump administration did not meaningfully de-escalate. By multiple accounts, the federal footprint in the Twin Cities had surged into the thousands, even as the president publicly threatened escalation under the Insurrection Act rather than focusing on restoring trust and restraint. When you keep pouring armed power into a city that’s protesting armed power, you’re not “maintaining order.” You’re gambling with human beings.

Alex’s family’s statement is the part that breaks your ribs from the inside: they say he was trying to protect a woman after officers pushed her down, phone in one hand, the other hand empty and raised, while being pepper-sprayed. This is a body. Blood on winter pavement. This is a person who clocked into a hospital and spent his days keeping other people from slipping away, killed in the street while doing, in some terrible continuity, the same thing: shielding someone smaller, someone targeted, someone already on the ground.

And then, as if the killing itself weren’t enough, the second violence arrived: the story the powerful told about him. DHS called it self-defense. Officials claimed he came to “inflict maximum damage,” even invoking “domestic terrorism” language, according to ABC’s live updates. His family called those claims “sickening lies.”

This is what modern state power does when it wants to keep its hands clean: it kills first, then launders the act through a narrative. It asks you to look away from the footage, to doubt what your eyes register, because if you look too closely, you might see what you’re not supposed to see, safety redefined into a weapon.

Minneapolis didn’t wander into this moment unaware. It has been living under a building pressure: protests, raids, people learning to record, learning to watch, learning to stand together in the kind of cold that makes your bones ache. The day before Pretti was killed, residents declared a general strike against the ICE presence; thousands demonstrated in subzero temperatures; clergy staged a sit-in at the airport and were arrested.

And still federal agents shot him the next morning. It was not even the first shooting this month. On January 7, an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, and a week later Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis was shot in the leg; DHS similarly asserted threats and self-defense across incidents. So when people flooded the streets after Pretti died, when grief turned into motion, when rage turned into marching, this wasn’t chaos. It was memory.

And the response was what it always is when those in power decide that public pain is an inconvenience: paralysis, force, “order.” The National Guard was activated, shows were canceled, a basketball game was postponed, the city moving like someone bracing for a blow they’ve already taken before. This is the part Americans like to believe can’t happen anymore, because we have phones now, because we have laws now, because we have commissions and reforms and slogans and press conferences. Because the modern government, so the story goes, learned.

But what if the lesson was never learned? What if it was simply paused, waiting for the kind of leadership that doesn’t treat the public as a constituency but as an obstacle? The New Yorker frames this surge as part of the Trump administration’s retributive approach to a liberal city, describing “Operation Metro Surge” and Trump’s political focus on Minnesota. The tone in the official statements, blame outward, deny inward, follows the same authoritarian muscle memory: if something goes wrong, it isn’t because power misused itself; it’s because the people forced power’s hand.

This is how an autocrat’s world feels from street level: your government stops sounding like it belongs to you. It starts sounding like it belongs to the man at the top, like a personal instrument, a lever, a threat. Like federal agents aren’t public servants but an occupying presence.

And then, because power always wants to be felt, the story hits its most unbearable note: he was a nurse. Not a soldier, not a cop. Not a man built for confrontation, a nurse, a person whose instinct is to ask the question that holds the world together when it’s falling apart: “Are you okay?”

Those words are what the country is supposed to say to the woman on the ground, to the man in the cold, to itself. Instead, the country is being told a different sentence: “It was justified.” And that sentence is doing a lot of work as it echoes through the skeptical hearts of Americans. It’s trying to build a wall between the public and its own eyes, trying to make you forget what you saw and remember only what you were told, trying to turn an ICU nurse into a threat because the alternative is too morally clear to survive contact with reality.

The most devastating part is how quickly it can feel normal, how fast we learn to step around the horror so we can keep walking to work, keep buying groceries, keep posting and scrolling and saying “unbelievable” as if disbelief is a form of resistance. It isn’t. Resistance is staying with the scene long enough that it changes you.

So stay with it: the truth is that a man stood up to help a woman he believed was hurt, pepper spray in the air, a scuffle, and then, painfully, gunfire. And then, after: a family begging the country to tell the truth about who their son was. That’s what makes the rumored question, “Are you okay?” so unbearable. Because it’s the question we were supposed to be asking each other by now, in the America we were promised, the America that grew up, the America that doesn’t need martyrs to remember it has a conscience.

But here we are again, in the cold, learning names. And if the final instinct of a dying man was still to protect, then let that destroy the easy stories. Let it destroy the lazy cynicism that says, “this is just how it is.” Let it put a hand on your throat and hold you in the truth: We are watching a government test whether it can get away with becoming what it swore it would never be again. And we don’t get to say, later, that we didn’t recognize the moment.