The two federal officers who fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday are now on paid leave, sources confirmed to ABC News on Wednesday.
Sources added that the paid administrative leave is standard operating procedure after an officer-involved shooting.
Just a day earlier, an “In Custody Death Notification” sent by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to the House Oversight Committee revealed that two officers — not one — fired shots during the encounter.
One of those officers is a Border Patrol agent, and the other is a Customs and Border Protection officer.
The news that they’re on leave comes after earlier statements from federal officials suggested the officers were still in the field.
“All agents that were involved in that scene are working, not in Minneapolis, but in other locations. That’s for their safety,” Border Patrol Commander at Large Greg Bovino said on Sunday.
Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, was fatally shot just after 9 a.m. Saturday near the intersection of Nicollet Avenue and 26th Street in a confrontation that has since been shared widely on social media.
Videos show an agent approaching a woman and shoving her to the ground, at which point Pretti is seen getting between the woman and the agent, who pepper sprays him. Agents then dragged him backward toward the street and tackled him to the ground, where at least five agents surrounded him. Seconds later, gunshots are fired.
DHS initially claimed that Pretti approached agents with a gun, and when agents tried to disarm him, he “violently resisted,” prompting one of the agents to fire “defensive shots.” Video appears to contradict that, and it never appears that Pretti brandished the weapon, which Minneapolis police said Pretti legally possessed.
The agents involved haven’t yet been publicly identified.
