Murder in Minneapolis
The masked agents of a tyrannical regime murder yet another American.
On a hot July in a Minneapolis suburb a decade ago, Philando Castile was stopped by police officer Jeronimo Yanez of the St. Anthony Police Department. Castile, who was African-American, worked as nutrition services supervisor at J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School in nearby St. Paul and was armed, having been issued a permit to carry a handgun in 2015. Before that day in July, Minnesota Public Radio reported, Castille had previously also found himself swept up in the now-discredited modus operandi of seeing law enforcement as a money-making scheme for cash-strapped municipalities:
He had been pulled over at least 52 times in recent years in and around the Twin Cities and given citations for minor offenses including speeding, driving without a muffler and not wearing a seat belt. He was assessed at least $6,588 in fines and fees, although more than half of the total 86 violations were dismissed, court records show.
During the traffic stop, after Castile informed Yanez that he was carrying a gun, Yanez then gave Castille a series of contradictory orders - produce his license but don’t move toward the gun - before Yanez shot and killed him. Yanez was subsequently charged, tried and acquitted of manslaughter and dangerous discharge of a firearm and fired from his job at the police.
The story of Philando Castile came to my mind as I watched the atrocious murder of Alex Pretti by agents of Donald Trump’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) yesterday in Minneapolis. Bystander video clearly and irrefutably shows that Pretti - who worked as nurse in the intensive care unit of a Veterans Health Administration facility, and who, like Castile, was a lawful gun owner with a concealed carry permit - did not have a gun in his hand and was assaulted by multiple masked CBP agents after he attempted to help a woman one of them had just shoved to the ground. Pretti was then shot multiple times while restrained even though, as a Washington Post investigation pointed out today, agents had seized his firearm before the first shot was fired. According to testimony of a witness from a declaration filed in federal court yesterday regarding Pretti’s killing
The agents pulled the man [Pretti] to the ground. I didn’t see him touch any of them - he wasn’t even turned toward them. It didn’t look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn’t see him with a gun. They threw him to the ground. Four or Five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him. They shot him so many times. I don’t know why they shot him. He was only helping. I was five feet from him and they just shot him.
A pediatrician who also witnessed the killing testified that
I did not see [Pretti] attack the agents or brandish a weapon of any kind…I saw at least four agents point guns at the man. Then I saw the agents shoot the man six or seven times.
Pretti’s killing occurred a little over two weeks after United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross murdered poet and mother Renée Good in the same city. Within hours of Good’s murder, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin publicly lied about the victim, claiming that Good “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them” in an act “of domestic terrorism.” A New York Times analysis of the footage concluded that the vehicle was in fact turning away from Ross, not towards him, as he fired. An analysis by the investigative journalism group Bellingcat showed “Ross moving out of the way and to the side of the vehicle as he fires.” Within days of Good’s murder, ICE agents were publicly threatening to kill observers, citing Good’s death as precedent. Trump also (falsely) claimed that the killing was justified because “the woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement…Law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff,” an assessment that apparently did not apply to his supporters whom, after he spoke to them and encouraged them, rioted and assaulted police officers on 6 January 2021. [Trump freed those convicted of assaulting law enforcement and other crimes from jail as soon as he was back in office.]
In a statement after Good’s killing, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche - Trump’s former personal lawyer who conducted the tête a tête with jailed convicted child sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator and former close Trump friend Ghislaine Maxwell that led to a dramatic improvement in Maxwell’s conditions of incarceration - claimed there was “no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” into Good’s slaying. The Department of Justice would instead spend its time investigating Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell and not releasing the immense trove of files related to Epstein, that it had been legally mandated to turn over. On 13 January, a majority of the leadership team at the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office quit in protest after administration officials forbade them from collaborating with local law enforcement and demanded they investigate Good’s widow for possible federal charges.
Minnesota Public Radio has extensively reported on ICE terror in Minnesota, which has included
A 17-year-old boy and citizen working at a Twin Cities Target was tackled by agents and bundled into a van only to be released later. A woman trying to get to a doctor’s appointment had her window smashed and was torn from her car. A seemingly unconscious man was carried limply by agents from his vehicle at a gas station.
The woman whose window was smashed was U.S. citizen Aliya Rahman, who was dragged from her car on 13 January while on the way to a routine appointment at the Traumatic Brain Injury Center.
[Given the propensity of federal agents for assaulting women, it is probably worth noting that since last year, Corey Lewandowski has been acting as de facto chief of staff to United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, herself a failed South Dakota governor and confessed animal abuser. Lewandowski and Noem have long been rumored to be having an affair and Lewandowski himself has a reported history of violent and predatory behaviour towards women. While serving as Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, police in Florida found probable cause to charge Lewandowski with assaulting then Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields after he violently grabbed the reporter’s arm, though the State Attorney declined to prosecute him. In 2017, singer Joy Villa accused Lewandowski of sexually assaulting her. In 2021, Lewandowski was accused of stalking and assaulting a major Trump donor at a charity event in Las Vegas.]
Horrific and unjustified as his murder was, it struck me how after the killing of Philando Castile, there was at least an investigation, an indictment and a trial of the officer who murdered him, regrettable as the outcome of that trial was. Nothing of the sort will happen to the ICE agent who killed Renée Good or, it seems, the killers of Alex Pretti. The Trump regime has simply decided that it will murder U.S. citizens on the streets of the nation’s cities with complete impunity and not even bother with the thinnest believable fig leaf of justification or due process.
In a press briefing after Pretti’s killing, Noem lied that “This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism.” Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security Stephen Miller - this administration’s bargain bin version of Joseph Goebbels - lied that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist [who] tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.” At a press briefing after Pretti’s killing yesterday, the lilliputian Reinhard Heydrich-wannabe Gregory Bovino - whose role of “commander-at-large” of the CBP was simply invented by the administration - lied and claimed that the murder looked “like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” This morning Bovino again lied about Pretti (who he absurdly referred to as “the suspect”), this time in an interview with CNN, when he falsely claimed that Pretti’s murder had “prevented any specific shootings of law enforcement, so good job for our law enforcement in taking him down before he was able to do that” before going on to state that “the victims are the Border Patrol agents.”
After having been denied access to the scene of the Pretti killing despite having a warrant signed by a judge, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the Minnesota state attorney general’s office and the Hennepin County attorney’s office sued DHS, ICE and CBP in court and won a judicial order blocking DHS from “destroying or altering” evidence, which one could be forgiven for believing will be ignored along with all the other laws this government has broken.
[The Minnesota Department of Corrections has even felt the need to launch a website tasked with correcting “ongoing misinformation” from DHS, which concluded that Bovino also lied about Jose Huerta-Chuma - the ostensible target of the operation the led to Peretti’s death - who had “never been in Minnesota DOC custody” and for whom court records showed “no felony commitments” but “only misdemeanor-level traffic offenses from more than a decade ago.”]
There are now - at least - “four times more immigration agents in the state than there are Minneapolis police officers.” Speaking to Face the Nation on CBS this morning, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara noted
This is the third shooting now in less than three weeks. The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year, recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone. And now this is the second American citizen that’s been killed, it’s the third shooting within three week…People have had enough.
[In referring to the “third shooting,” O’Hara was alluding to an incident where ICE agents shot a Venezuelan man in the leg earlier this month and then apparently lied about that, as well.]
In the United States today, we are living in an atmosphere of total executive lawlessness where ICE and CBP are basically functioning as the roving would-be Einsatzgruppen of an imperial presidency, used to terrorize places (Chicago, New Orleans, Maine, Minnesota) viewed as politically hostile to the regime, using a crackdown on illegal immigration as only the vaguest pretext. In its now-infamous July 2024 ruling on presidential immunity, the United States Supreme Court for all practical purposes granted presidents the power to engage in criminal activity under the guise of their official powers, a decision that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated “for the first time in history places presidents substantially above the law” and which the Brennan Center for Justice called “an affront to democracy and the rule of law, forfeiting critical checks on executive power.” In her own scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” The Republican-majority Congress has completely abandoned its role as a co-equal branch of the U.S. government. In the regime’s vast gulag where it sends those it plucks off the street and spirits away in unmarked cars, detainees are being murdered by agents of the state.
We are many, many miles outside of anything that resembles the rule of law and the separation of powers and the question now is what is the best way to respond to this new reality and how to best protect our loved ones and neighbors. The only thing now standing between the regime and its full totalitarian aspirations is the heroism of ordinary citizens like Alex Pretti and Renée Good, who are being cut down by masked regime thugs in the street. Trump has repeatedly threatened to evoke the Insurrection Act, the highly controversial 1807 law that empowers the U.S. president to federalize National Guard units in individual states and nationally deploy the armed forces, and he has shown every intention to meddle in and perhaps outright derail the 2026 midterm elections which will likely result in a Democratic majority in one and possibly both houses of Congress and thus in a litany of investigations and the certainly of a third impeachment. What is the way forward it such a situation?
In the United States of 2026, the terrible reality is that our neighbors are being disappeared and killed. And the implications of this if it is not stopped quickly are frightening. When the exiled Syrian activist Marcelle Shehwaro noted how, before that country’s civil war erupted in 2011, she would quickly respond to the question “Am I capable of killing?” with a swift “Impossible!” However, after the war had gone on for eight years and countless atrocities been committed by its participants - especially by the government of dictator Bashar al-Assad - she realized that the question was more difficult:
Is passive surrender to your murderer another type of killing? Killing yourself? Ending your life or the lives of others whom you were supposed to protect? Did living constantly with death to the point of familiarity, and all the anxiety and uncertainty one experiences as a result, cause the answer to my initial question to become, truthfully, I don’t know?
I am the grandson, great-grandson and great-great grandson of Lutheran ministers drawn from a German emigration from the Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg and Saarland to Pennsylvania that long predates the founding of the United States as a nation. I’ve read the Bible from cover to cover and in it, and in virtually every other spiritual text I have read from various religions, one is imbued with a sense of the preciousness and sanctity of life. My entire professional career as a journalist and author has been about highlighting to common humanity we all share and trying build bridges between people and places. Having seen the terrible price that civil armed conflict exact on the people of countries I have reported on, I am fervently hoping that the other branches of government can step in - at long last - and rein in a bloodthirsty, unaccountable would-be tyrant and his acolytes. But their time to do so I fear is running out quickly and I know from experience that if citizens believe the system will not protect them, they will seek other means to protect themselves. The regime has proved that it has no allergy to blood and we are dancing on the precipice every day now. The current power in Washington believes that it should be able to murder U.S. citizens in the street, get away with it, and then lie about it afterwards. I don’t think that’s the kind of country that most Americans will passively accept living in.
After the murder of Alex Pretti, his family released the following statement:
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 has 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.
May we all honour the memories of Alex Pretti and Renée Good by working to end this horrible campaign of state terrorism. May whatever higher power you believe in bless and protect the people of Minneapolis and wherever the monsters turn their sights next. There are more of us than there are of them. All power to the people of our besieged nation and its grieving communities.
In love and anger,
MD
There appears to be some retreat happening. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board can't stomach the latest murder in cold blood. What has most impressed me is the spontaneous solidarity of the besieged communities in Minneapolis. But people are scared and exhausted. I watched young women completely break down sobbing on the French news program the Quotidien that has a reporter on the scene describing what it is like in their neighborhoods.