VA Employees in Shock Over Alex Pretti’s Death

Ever since Florence Nightingale brought her intrepid band of nurses to care for English soldiers during the Crimean War in 1854, nurses have been on the front lines of caring for soldiers and then, when they become veterans, tending to their visible and invisible wounds of war and military service. In so doing, nurses—whether men or women—have risked their lives and health to care for their patients.

On Saturday, January 24, another nurse sacrificed his life to protect the sick and vulnerable when he joined thousands of other ordinary Minneapolis residents to protest the occupation of their city by federal immigration agents. Alex Jeffrey Pretti didn’t know that, after attempting to help a woman whom ICE agents had assaulted with pepper spray, he would be brutally murdered. But he was killed, not because he was filming ICE agents or because he happened to have a licensed and permitted firearm, but because he was fulfilling his oath as a nurse.

In a stirring new dispatch for The American Prospect, VHPI Senior Policy Analyst Suzanne Gordon writes about Pretti, and his honorable service to the Veterans Health Administration, and American veterans. Her interviews with VHA employees show that they have not only been devastated by the killing of one of their colleagues, but also by the administration’s callous response to it.

Read her piece here.