By Michael Wood
PEACHTREE CORNERS, Ga. | In moments like this, clarity matters more than rhetoric. What follows is not speculation, but a summary of what is known—because the minimum obligation in the face of state violence is to bear witness.
On Saturday morning (Jan. 25, 2026), Alex Jeffrey Pretti was standing on a public street observing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents. Like many legal observers, he was recording their actions with his phone.
At some point, a DHS agent approached Pretti and began pushing him backward. Moments later, multiple agents converged on him.
Video footage shows Pretti on the ground while a group of agents assaulted him. One agent appears to strike him in the head with a firearm. Then, at point-blank range, an agent shot Pretti. Additional agents fired as well. Within seconds, Pretti lay motionless on the pavement while at least one agent continued firing. He was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.
That alone would constitute a grave incident. What followed deepened its severity. Some of the DHS agents involved attempted to leave the scene. When local law enforcement arrived to investigate, DHS agents reportedly tried to prevent them from accessing the area and urged them to leave. Soon after, information was leaked to Fox News claiming Pretti had a gun.
DHS issued a public statement asserting that Pretti approached agents with a 9mm hand gun, violently resisted disarmament, and posed a mass-casualty threat. Border Patrol official Greg Bovino repeated these claims, framing the killing as self-defense.
Available evidence contradicts that account. Local law enforcement confirmed that Pretti held a valid concealed-carry permit and was legally allowed to possess a firearm. No video shows him brandishing or touching a weapon. Instead, footage shows him holding his phone in his right hand, with his left hand empty, moments before he was pepper-sprayed while attempting to assist another observer.
Despite this, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller publicly labeled Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin.” In reality, Pretti was a registered nurse working in an intensive care unit at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital.
The government did not merely kill a citizen in public, in daylight, before witnesses. It then sought to justify the killing through falsehoods and character assassination.
This incident does not stand alone. Less than three weeks earlier, DHS agents killed another Minneapolis resident, Renee Good. Rather than pause, investigate, or reform, the agency surged hundreds more agents into the city and escalated its use of force.
The killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti was not a misunderstanding or an isolated tragedy. It was the foreseeable result of a policy choice—one made after prior deaths and reinforced through denial and propaganda.
The Trump Administration has removed Greg Bovino from Minnesota and sent the so-called border czar, Tom Homan, to head up DHS operations in the state.
Maybe, just maybe, those changes will halt the most heinous actions of these out-of-control federal agents. That would help the situation, but it is far from enough to stop the un-American behavior of Donald Trump’s masked agents in our country.
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