One of the witnesses who recorded the killing of Alex Pretti has claimed that an officer at the scene hurled a misogynistic slur at her just before the VA nurse was shot.
Minneapolis resident Kayla Schultz, who recorded the shooting through the window of her car, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that federal immigration agents yelled at her and accused her of obstruction.
“Before the video even starts, several federal agents crossed the street to come over to my window to tell me that I was obstructing and they would pull me out of my car and arrest me for that,” Schultz told Cooper in an interview.
“I told them I wasn’t obstructing anything. We exchanged some not-so-nice words back and forth. The last thing that that federal agent who came up to my window said, and he screamed it at the top of his lungs, right in my face, was that, I’m a fucking c—.”
“Have you ever had a law enforcement officer say anything like that?” Cooper asked her.
“No, absolutely not. No one has ever actually called me that word at all.” She added that while she was scared, she “absolutely refused to show them” that she was.
“I think, and we saw this in the video, that they feed off of that. They want us to be afraid. And they want us to be intimidated.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
Explaining to Cooper why she chose to come forward despite potential ramifications to her career and her safety, she said, “I need people to know what is going on here.”
“I am scared of speaking out and having this public, having my face out there and my name, but if I can muster up 1 percent of the courage that Alex had shown there in order to maybe make some amount of change, I will,” she continued.
“They want us, again, to be afraid of them. They want us to be scared, intimidated into silence, and we cannot. I can lose my safety. I can lose security. They can take everything away from me. But they can’t take my voice.”
Schultz also revealed that while she immediately shared her video with state investigators, and gave them a statement, she has not yet been contacted by federal investigators.
Her video was one of several that went viral on Saturday in the wake of the horrific shooting of Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Affairs ICU nurse, by Customs and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis.
Stella Carlson, whose footage of Pretti’s killing also went viral, revealed in a Tuesday interview with Cooper that she had also not been contacted by federal authorities.
“They‘re protecting themselves and they don‘t care about the truth of what happened,” she told Cooper. “They’re looking for their way to create the truth that protects them and allows them to move forward with whatever it is—which we all have various ideas of what that looks like—but whatever it is that their long game is in, in creating this violence in our streets, our streets.”
Pretti’s death was the second fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis in a month, following the killing of Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7 by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
Nobody has yet been charged for either of their deaths. Instead, the agents who killed Pretti were placed on three-day paid administrative leave. Once completed, they were due to return to desk duty.
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