What you need to know, January 29, 2026: Alex Pretti was not a hero; he was a mensch

The ghastly, yet riveting, video of the murder of Alex Pretti has been on all our minds, day and night. I happened to be on the internet at the moment when social media alerted the world to the killing. I watched the first circulating, mysterious video, taken from across the street, when all that was discernible was a group of fatigue-suited men were bent over beating someone. Shots rang out, and the group dispersed to reveal a body face-down on the ground. I spent that whole day following the reports and the videos.

Two days later, unable to resist, I was back watching the videos in slow motion, reading and rereading the media articles. None of the verbal descriptions, short or long, said what I saw. We all know that the government’s descriptions are wildly inaccurate, to say the least, but nothing I have read shows Mr. Pretti’s amazing determination not to engage with his assailants. The best account is in the Wikipedia article “Killing of Alex Pretti” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alex_Pretti).

As is the practice of Wikipedia, this article is a consensus compendium of net-users’ shared, verifiable, and publicly verified information: it is what we commonly, together know filtered through discussion and debate that anyone can join. But even this description of what happened (criticized for being too long and detailed) does not approach what I think we all saw on the videos.

At the moment of the immediate encounter, the only gesture Mr. Pretti makes towards the assailant is to raise one hand (holding his cell phone) to ward off the spray directed at his face. He does this almost as an involuntary, defensive gesture, even as he is turning, not towards his assailant but away from him, towards the woman collapsed on the ground next to him. He grabs her hand with his free hand. His thoughts are on her. His back is turned to the assailant, who then grabs Mr. Pretti’s hood, dangling behind him. And as his assailant pulls him backwards, off-balance, Mr. Pretti holds onto the woman’s hands. He is hit by another shot of irritant. Both he and the woman are dragged into the street before he lets go of the woman, who is instantly attacked by another assailant, while Mr. Pretti is attacked by a horde of assailants.

My intent here is not to show that the authorities lied about what happened; though, they did and continue to do. I’m astounded by who he is, at that moment, at how these images construct for us the flitting concerns of his consciousness, how his actions create for us the person he was, the life of awareness that constituted his humanity at the very moment it was taken from him by unidentified assailants protected by the power of the federal government and by our choice of that government.

In his actions, Mr. Pretti shows none of the characteristics of the two thousand year tradition of the Western hero, so consciously and unconsciously loved by our President and his minions, so mimetically revered by his assailants, and so commonly portrayed in our fictional film heroes acted out by one famous actor after another from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood to Bruce Willis to Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is not that individualistic, aggressive, personally powerful attacker of evil, whose speed at response to threats gives him added advantage in combating inhumane forces.

He’s the alternative to the hero: someone, just anyone, who is centered in the community of humans rather than in himself. He is just someone, anyone, who defends rather than attacks. Someone, anyone who turns away even as they are pulled into a beating. Like all of us, he knows that he is mortal, and he knows that that mortality which defines life has to be given a value. That knowledge, which he displays for us in these circulating videos of his death, differentiates him from his heroic murderers for whom human life seems to have no value.

Alex Pretti could be someone, anyone, singing, “We’ll take our stand for this land/ and the stranger in our midst.” Play it and sing it: https://www.siriusxm.com/blog/bruce-springsteen-streets-of-minneapolis.