Alex Pretti’s final minutes unfolded in chaos: a traffic-clogged street, federal agents wrestling with protesters, a nurse with a cellphone trying to shield a woman from being shoved into moving cars. Pepper spray hit his face. He dropped to his knees, reaching toward a backpack, likely for water. Within seconds, at least six agents swarmed him. One struck him, another pulled what DHS calls a gun from his waistband and walked away. Then, as Alex lay prone on the sidewalk, the shots exploded. Ten rounds. No visible weapon in his hands. A still body left bleeding on cold concrete while a voice in the background asked, “Where’s the gun?”

In the days that followed, his parents learned their son was dead from a reporter, not from authorities. As they watched the footage, they saw not a terrorist, but the man they knew: a VA nurse, a protester who believed in nonviolence, a son who had promised not to “do anything stupid.” Federal officials labeled him a would‑be mass killer, the president amplified that claim, and DHS released photos of a gun they said proved murderous intent. Yet no evidence surfaced of a plot, only a legally owned firearm and a dead citizen. Experts called the shooting unjustified and the rhetoric reckless. For Alex’s family, the politics are a cruel distraction. Their reality is a memorial on a Minneapolis sidewalk, an empty chair at the table, and a single, unshakable demand: that the country look closely at those videos, listen to the contradictions, and admit what was taken from them in those ten deafening shots.