The Justice Department has opened a federal civil rights probe into the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Friday.
Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse, was fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday after a heated confrontation between authorities and protesters. The shooting, which came just weeks after Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by a federal officer while in her car, spurred intense backlash over the Trump administration’s immigration operations in Minnesota.
“We’re looking at everything that would shed light on what happened that day and in the days and weeks leading up to what happened,” Blanche said during a press conference Friday related to the latest release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Pretti’s family attorney, Steve Schleicher, said in a statement to NBC News that “the family’s focus is on a fair and impartial investigation that examines the facts around his murder.”
The FBI has since taken a lead on the investigation into Pretti’s death, which was initially handled by the Department of Homeland Security. Customs and Border Protection is also conducting an internal probe on the two Border Patrol agents who fired their guns during the shooting and have since been placed on administrative leave.
Blanche did not go into detail on why the DOJ decided to open a case into Pretti’s death, but suggested that the circumstances of this case merit a probe.
“There are thousands, unfortunately, of law enforcement events every year where somebody is shot. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice does not investigate every one of those shootings,” he said. “There has to be circumstances or facts, or maybe unknown facts, but certainly circumstances that warrant an investigation.”
Blanche added about Pretti’s shooting: “President Trump has said repeatedly, ‘Of course, this is something we’re going to investigate.’”
Blanche added Friday that he does not know where Pretti’s phone is or the gun that he had on him before his death. He also would not commit to releasing the body-camera footage of Pretti’s death.
News of the DOJ investigation came hours after Trump called Pretti an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist” in a post on Truth Social. The rebuke is an increase in the president’s rhetoric toward Pretti after he recently said he wanted to “de-escalate a little bit” in Minnesota.
In the post, Trump said that Pretti’s “stock has gone way down with the just released video of him screaming and spitting in the face of a very calm and under control ICE Officer, and then crazily kicking in a new and very expensive government vehicle, so hard and violent, in fact, that the taillight broke off in pieces.’
NBC News previously reported on the video, shared online this week, that appeared to show Pretti in an altercation with federal immigration agents just days before he was fatally shot. In the video taken Jan. 13, Pretti is seen yelling at them and kicking the back of a vehicle used by agents, breaking a taillight. It is not clear what happened before the interaction.
“It was quite a display of abuse and anger, for all to see, crazed and out of control. The ICE Officer was calm and cool, not an easy thing to be under those circumstances! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump said in the post Friday.
