he man fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday morning has been identified as 37-year-old Alex Pretti.

Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, the city where he lived. He was a keen outdoorsman and biked trails near his home.

Pretti’s father, Michael, said he wanted to “make a difference in this world.”

“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,” he said in a statement shared with several media outlets.

“Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact,” he added.

Multiple videos of Saturday’s shooting show Border Patrol agents spraying Pretti with a substance and pinning him to the ground before the shooting. Moments before the confronation, Pretti was attempting to help a woman protester who was being pushed by a federal agent.

Pretti’s family said he had been motivated to join the protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the killing of another Minneapolis resident, 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, by a federal agent just over two weeks ago.

“He cared about people deeply and he was very upset with what was happening in Minneapolis and throughout the United States with ICE, as millions of other people are upset,” Michael Pretti told the Associated Press. “He felt that doing the protesting was a way to express that, you know, his care for others.”

A photograph of 37-year-old Alex Pretti can be seen at a makeshift memorial in the area where he was shot dead by federal immigration agents earlier in the day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 24, 2026. Roberto Schmidt—AFP via Getty Images

He said he had a conversation with his son earlier this month in which he told him to be careful while protesting.

“We had this discussion with him two weeks ago or so, you know, that go ahead and protest, but do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically,” Michael Pretti said. “And he said he knows that. He knew that.”

At a news conference on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Pretti was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit to carry a firearm in public and only had a few parking tickets.

Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, a former colleague of Pretti’s at the VA Hospital, described him as “a kind person who lived to help.”

“He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together,” Drekonja said in a post on BlueSky. “Will never happen now,” he added.

Born in Illinois, Pretti graduated from Preble High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 2006. He went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 2011, before attaining a nursing license.

Pretti was devoted to his patients at the VA hospital. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents professional employees affiliated with the Minneapolis VA Hospital, said Pretti “dedicated his life to serving American veterans.”

“While details of the incident are still emerging, one fact is already clear: this tragedy did not happen in a vacuum. It is the direct result of an administration that has chosen reckless policy, inflammatory rhetoric, and manufactured crisis over responsible leadership and de-escalation,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

After watching coverage of the shooting on the news, Mac Randolph recognized Pretti as the man who cared for his father, Terry Randolph, during his final days in December 2024.

“He spent three, four days in the ICU and explained everything that would happen when they turned off the oxygen,” he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “He was as compassionate a person as you could be.”

After his father passed, Randolph said Pretti took his father, an Air Force veteran, on an “honorary walk” around the facility on his gurney, draped in an American flag.

“You could see that it wasn’t the first time he had done that,” he said.

Randolph said he felt compelled to share a video on social media in which Pretti reads a final tribute to his father, Terry, who passed away at 77-years-old.

“Today, we remember that freedom is not free,” Pretti says in the video. “We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it.”