Within hours of Alex Pretti being killed by a federal officer in Minneapolis, the government decided who he was.
They said he was a terrorist.
They said he came to kill law enforcement.
They said the case was clear.
But the evidence tells a very different story.
Alex Pretti was a 37-year-old ICU nurse, a licensed gun owner, and a U.S. citizen who was filming a federal immigration enforcement operation when things escalated. Video shows him holding a phone. Witnesses say he moved toward a woman who had been shoved to the ground. Seconds later, he was dead.
In this episode of The In Between, Mel Barrett breaks down what actually happened — and what happened next: how senior officials in the Trump administration rushed to declare motive, intent, and guilt before the public had access to the evidence; how the right’s long-standing claims about guns, protests, and “intent” suddenly collapsed; and how a coordinated narrative blitz turned a witness into a threat.
This is not just a story about a killing.
It’s a story about how the state controls the narrative after lethal force — and why some lives are explained away instead of examined.
Because once the public accepts the label, the questions stop.
And that’s how accountability dies.
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