I grew up with Alex Pretti

The day Alex Pretti was shot 10 times in the street by federal agents, I was delivering a eulogy for my grandfather, who died the way we’re supposed to: old, asleep, surrounded by family. Because it’s my job to coordinate visuals for this website, I locked myself in a bathroom stall, watched a video of the shooting twice, and emailed a photographer, asking if he could get onto the streets and start documenting what was happening in Minneapolis.

As I reviewed photos of protesters and tear gas in the wake of his death, I didn’t realize, in the hours before his name was released to the public, that the man millions of people had seen lying facedown on the pavement from multiple angles of eyewitness video was my childhood best friend.

We have become familiar with being barraged by videos of people we do not know getting detained and ripped from their families and beaten by agents whose salaries we pay. As social media does its work putting bits and pieces together about each day of unfolding tragedy, more and more of us will realize that those pieces belong to someone we know.

Alex and I grew up across the street from each other in a quiet neighborhood in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a town maniacal about its football team and without much else to do. The street we lived on had recently been a field, now populated with a smattering of three-bedroom houses rapidly constructed in a treeless subdivision. I met Alex when he was three years old and I was four. Our family’s lives were exceedingly visible to each other, without fences or much foliage, and we knew the comings and goings of one another’s households.

Alex was an easy playmate: generous, curious, sweet. His mother always ensured he had a tidy haircut and a clean room. He had a little sister. He told me the truth about Santa, and I told him the truth about where babies come from.

We rollerbladed and had sleepovers, excitedly dragging our sleeping bags across the street from one house to the other. We built palatial forts in the snowdrifts after the plows went through. Lawn sprinklers in summers became portals to different realms and time periods; we ran through the strands of water with towels tied around our necks as capes. When Alex had his bedroom window open, I could hear him singing all the way from my own open window. His voice was operatic and strong, carrying above the suburban drone of leafblowers and lawnmowers. He loved mandarin oranges and macaroni and cheese, and we agreed it was especially pleasing when all the food on our plates was orange.

Over the last few days, I’ve seen a lot of posts on social media about how you don’t have to watch the video, about how it’s okay to protect yourself from it, because we don’t need to watch another public execution. But when an Associated Press journalist called his parents after their son was shot, they hadn’t heard the news. The journalist sent them the video, and they said it looked like their son.

There is something destabilizing about having known someone only as a child and then hearing they were gunned down in the street. The person you see in your mind lying in that street is still a child. I’m sure his mother feels that way, too, or she sees him at every age all at once, including those he did not live to see.

After Alex was wrestled down to the ground, and after a federal agent pulled the trigger and Alex went still, nine more shots were fired into his body. I keep reading reports that there was a struggle before the first gunshot, but all I see is a person trying to keep his head off the ground while seven masked men surround and beat him. Certainly, through his training as an ICU nurse, he knew that it was important to protect his head. Once in the old neighborhood, when he was seven or eight, he’d fallen off his bike, his helmet splitting cleanly in half like a cantaloupe. He showed the halves to all the neighbor kids as a way to warn them to never ride without one.

The lies being told about him by America’s most powerful people are flagrantly incongruous to anyone who watches the videos. He doesn’t reach for his weapon at his waistband, which he had the legal right to carry, and which an agent removed from him before they killed him. He was not approaching the officers when they pepper-sprayed him and tackled him to the ground. He was helping up a woman who those same agents had just shoved to the curb.

My family moved away as I started high school, and Alex’s mother asked to talk with me before we left. She wanted to understand how she could stay close to her son and keep him safe while still allowing him the freedom to grow as he got older. Was it okay if she asked him to check in when he went to a new location with friends, she wondered. Would those friends make fun of him, or would they recognize that he was loved?

The other video that’s gone most viral of Alex shows him providing a final salute for an ICU patient at the VA hospital where he worked. Alex speaks in a low, reverent tone before a flag-draped body, demonstrating the same compassion we saw in the footage of him helping a woman who’d been pushed to the ground by federal agents. It’s the same caring tenor of his voice in his last words: Are you okay?