Friends and family members of Alex Pretti are sharing their memories of the 37-year-old intensive care nurse after he was fatally shot by federal officers in Minneapolis on Saturday.
Dr. Aasma Shaukat, a former colleague and supervisor of Pretti’s, joined “The Weekend: Primetime” on MS NOW to talk about her experiences with him and share her reaction to how the Trump administration has tried to characterize him.
“The Alex we knew was a caring, kind individual,” Shaukat said Sunday, recalling how he joined the team as an “enthusiastic” research assistant. “He said on Day 1 that he wanted to help vulnerable individuals and patients and contribute to his community and help his society.”
Shaukat said Pretti was a “great colleague” and “always the first one to help.”
“He’s the person that would open doors for you as you were walking in,” she said. “He would hold the elevators for anybody wanting to get in. And if he saw patients kind of lost in the hospital walking around, he would actually make an effort to help them get to where they were trying to go.”
Videos of Saturday’s shooting show that just before the confrontation with federal officers, Pretti was helping a fellow protester, an act that did not surprise Shaukat.
“His jumping in to assist somebody that he thought was in harm’s way, had fallen, was vulnerable in any way, is very much what I would expect Alex to do,” she said, adding that officers responded with behavior that was “extremely aggressive and completely uncalled for.”
After the shooting, federal officials have tried to paint Pretti as the aggressor in the situation. But Shaukat said the “public deserves to know” that her former colleague “was a kind and very, very caring human being with not a mean bone in his body.”
“He was you and I,” she added. “He would care for his colleagues, his neighbors, his community, and he always spoke of how important it was to always be empathetic.”
That empathy, Shaukat said, was evident even in Pretti’s final moments: “He actually just wanted to help. And he wanted to support his community and his fellow citizens, and I think that’s what he was doing.”
You can watch Shaukat’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”