Are You Okay?

Are you okay, Annie?

Alex Pretti with his phone in his hand.

It wasn’t long yesterday before we learned his name, and saw the second video, and the third. The woman in pink, frightened out of her mind, got her video online. It was a very short while before we knew he was a goddamned ICU nurse at the goddamned VA.

And it was only a short while later that Alex Pretti’s parents, Michael and Susan, had to send such a statement as this:

We are heartbroken but also very angry.

Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact.

I do not throw around the ‘hero’ term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed.

Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.

Imagine having to write such a thing. Imagine having to watch the videos of your son being murdered in the street so you could scream NO, NO, THESE ARE LIES against the disgusting monsters saying it was your child who was there to do murder — and who never informed you of your son’s death at all. Rather, you got the news from the news, when an AP reporter called to ask you about your son. Your son, the Boy Scout who played football and baseball, and sang in the Green Bay Choir, and went back to college again after a research career to become a registered nurse. When the last thing he did was protect a woman, and his last words, according to the internet, were “are you okay?” But everybody seems to be citing back to a single source on that, and I don’t know that that single source ever talked to the woman who supposedly told them so. I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s actually true or not. It feels true. Honestly, it probably is.

Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.

Even the New York Times took the words “Appear to” out of their headline “Videos Contradict Federal Accounts of Shooting.” Right there above the fold.

I watched the videos. It’s my job. You don’t have to. At first you can’t even tell what you’re looking at; wait, did HE pepper-spray THEM? Then you slow it down frame by frame to watch who’s where in the violent double-scrum. He didn’t. He didn’t do a thing except help. And Minnesota, instead of cowering in their homes, came out. Again.

They didn’t stop coming after the fascists murdered Renee Good, a poet, right in her face. And they didn’t stop coming after the fascists murdered Alex Pretti, unarmed, in the back. And they’ll keep coming, teaching us all how to be brave.

And teaching Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats, maybe. He says Democrats will no longer help pass funding for Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security. That ICE is already rolling in it like Croesus thanks to Trump’s insane Big Fuck Bill doesn’t matter. It’s the goddamn principle. Chuck’s imaginary friends the Baileys want him to shut down DHS.

Just two days before, two citizen women being detained by ICE goons — n.b. I don’t care if thugs are ICE or CBP or what have you, ICE is generic, the same as xerox and kleenex, now — saved an agent’s life. In gratitude, the goons allowed the women, whom they had no legal right to arrest, to make a phone call.

This time, for Alex Pretti, they let a doctor in. Whether they said “boo hoo” or clapped over his body, as the internet says, I don’t know. I didn’t see it. But it all is of a piece.

And of a piece with Pretti’s whole life was this 2024 video. At his work, honoring a dead veteran, with words about freedom.

“Today we remember,” he said, “that freedom is not free. We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it. May we never forget and always remember our brothers and sisters who have served so that we may enjoy the gift of freedom. So in this moment, we remember and give thanks for their dedication and selfless service to our nation in the cause of our freedom. In this solemn hour, we render them our honor and our gratitude.”

Wonkette is ad-free and never has a paywall. If you would like to keep us keeping on, please feel free to make a donation, one-time or monthly, in any amount of your choosing here.