Pretti leaves legacy as a caring mentor and preceptor

Photo: Caroline Yang

The Jan. 24 shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis Veterans Affairs ICU nurse, by Customs and Border Protection agents involved in Operation Metro Surge triggered widespread protests and calls for increased oversight of federal immigration task forces operating in the Twin Cities.

As a nurse at the VA, Pretti also served as a preceptor to Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) students at the University of Minnesota.

“Alex worked closely with some of the students I taught in the BSN program. He was highly regarded by the students who worked with him, particularly for his ability to gently coach them out of their comfort zone while encouraging them to try new skills with him close by,” says Clinical Associate Professor Mary DeGrote Goering, PhD, RN-BC, CNE.

Ben Matson, BSN, RN, who graduated in 2025, says the lessons Pretti taught him made him a better nurse.

“I was Alex’s nursing student for six months last year in the ICU at the VA. He wasn’t just my mentor, but a friend who cared deeply about the veterans he served and the community around him,” says Matson. “He taught me what it means to care for our neighbors when they were at the most vulnerable point of their lives.”

Alex Pretti Nursing Scholarship established 

In response to outreach from those wishing to honor Pretti, and with the consent of the Pretti family, the University of Minnesota School of Nursing established the Alex Pretti Nursing Scholarship. 

The Alex Pretti Nursing Scholarship is designed specifically to support students who are dedicated to veterans’ care, ensuring that Pretti’s commitment to those who served our country continues through the nurses of tomorrow. By providing financial assistance to students who share his passion for this field, the scholarship aims to carry forward his spirit of advocacy and leadership.

More information on the Alex Pretti Nursing Scholarship can be found at z.umn.edu/AlexPretti

Watching a healer fall

for doing what our bodies are trained, born, called to do,
is watching history replay in blood and blue lights.

We are supposed to help. To heal.
Yet here we stand, one of ours laid bare
before a machine that sees no humanity,
and all I can think is: how do we keep showing up to care
when the world keeps executing the ones who try?

Executed for mercy. Punished for pulse-checking fate.
It’s not just blood on the ground;
it’s medicine spilled,

You can feel it in your bones, this betrayal:
We came to heal, not to bleed.
The chest caves, breath ragged as a marathon finish,
tears hot from rage.
Ancestors lean in, grandmothers whispering,
“We’ve danced this grief before, daughter”

It’s the same script: ancestors hanged, starved, shot for standing tall.
But this? This is us now: nurses, doctors, researchers, community advocates.
Rage demands justice, demands we rise,
or the fire dies with him.

And the body? Oh, it remembers.
Pulse races like fleeing from cavalry ghosts.
Stomach twists, kin-deep nausea, familial echo
of every raid, every boarding school scar.

“Breathe. We’re still here.”
But beyond words, the spirit howls 
a healer’s vow unbroken,
even as history repeats its cruel verse.

Anguish uncoils like roots from this land.
Heart fractures along ancestral fault lines
we’ve buried healers before, under moonless skies.

Beyond words, we stand.
Helpers forged in wound and willow.
Your light lingers in our hands
medicine that outlives the blade.

“I keep replaying it in my mind.
Not just the moment of violence, but that quiet before it, that instinctual, automatic response only a Nurse understands: move toward the pain, not away from it; protect, not punish; stabilize, not judge. And then watching someone be executed, in spirit if not in law, for doing exactly that. For having a healer’s reflex in a world that doesn’t always value healing.

And then there’s the betrayal. Betrayed by a world that applauds us as heroes when it’s convenient, and disappears when we are harmed for living out that heroism in real time, in messy, unphotogenic situations. As helpers, we are used to being the ones other people fall apart in front of. We hold space for sobbing families, angry patients, broken systems. We absorb their stories, their fear, their fury, and then clock out and drive home as if we didn’t just watch someone’s world end. But seeing a healer being destroyed for simply reacting as a healer, that’s the kind of event that steals language…”

Mary Rattler-Laducer, BSN, RN, ACRN, Blackfeet Nation tribal member, is a Doctor of Nursing Practice student in the health innovation and leadership specialty and a student in the Doctoral Education Pathway for American Indian/Alaska Native Nurses.