'Pink coat' witness makes shocking revelation after filming Alex Pretti's death
A woman who was filming Alex Pretti's death has made a revelation that the Trump administration has not contacted her about it, despite her being a major witness.
Stella Carson had been on her way to work wearing a pink coat when she heard the sound of whistles, which Minneapolis residents had taken to wearing to warn each other that federal agents with Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were coming.
She told CNN that she also had a whistle, which she carries whenever she leaves the house or gets out of the car 'because of Renee Good', saying she knew there was 'risk' after the 37-year-old woman was shot dead by ICE agents in Minneapolis earlier this month while driving away from them.
"I think we all knew after that happened, it is now at that point, and it could be any of us," she said, and explained that she saw a brawl in the street and Alex Pretti trying to direct traffic.
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Getting out of her car to start filming, the video she took showed Pretti trying to help a woman being pepper-sprayed by Border Patrol agents before being shot several times.
Her footage also shows that Pretti never held the gun he was permitted to carry and said she wouldn't even have known he had one without the video.
After Pretti was shot dead, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described him as an 'armed suspect' and claimed that a federal agent 'fired defensive shots', but Carson's video shows he never had the gun out at all.
The footage the witness took also showed Pretti did not try to attack federal agents, instead putting himself between them and a woman they were pepper-praying, despite the insistence from White House senior adviser Stephen Miller that the man had 'tried to murder federal law enforcement'.
Noem and Miller tried to call Pretti a 'domestic terrorist', but the White House distanced itself from those claims yesterday, as press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she'd 'not heard the president characterize Mr Pretti in that way'.
Carson's video underlines how it has become a necessity for Minneapolis residents to film interactions with ICE and Border Patrol, as the claims from officials in the Trump administration differ significantly from the evidence gathered by people filming.
Carson said she had seen people die in hospices, and as such, she knew that Pretti was not going to survive after he had been shot.
“I remember him arching his back and his head rolling back. I knew he was gone because I watched it," the witness said.
"And then they come over to try to perform some type of medical aid by ripping his clothes open with scissors, and then maneuvering his body around like a rag doll, only to discover that it could be because they wanted to count the bullet wounds to see how many they got, like he’s a deer", she claimed.
Despite being such an important witness to the killing of Alex Pretti, Carson made the revelation that federal law enforcement had not contacted her to speak with her about it.
She told Anderson Cooper she now had 'a legal team now who are fielding much of that', and when he contacted her attorney, they said nobody from 'the FBI or the federal government' had been in touch.
When asked why she thought she hadn't been contacted about the killing of Pretti yet, she said it indicated to her 'that they're protecting themselves and they don't care about the truth of what happened'.
Joe Harker