Why We Cannot Look Away from Alex Pretti's Death

There are moments when words feel too fragile to hold the truth. When a life is taken so suddenly, so publicly, language seems to break under the weight of it. That’s what happened on a Minnesota street, where 37-year-old Alex Pretti was killed before witnesses, cameras, and a world that already feels too familiar with scenes like this.

To call it an act of violence feels too small. To call it shocking feels dishonest, because there’s nothing new about this kind of loss, only the enduring ache that it leaves behind. Alex was more than a name in a headline. He was a person who walked through this same uncertain world as the rest of us, someone who deserved the simple guarantee of coming home safely.

What happened to him is unbearable to describe, yet impossible to ignore. There is a stillness in the air after such a tragedy—a silence heavy with all the things that should have been done differently. The videos, the headlines, the statements, they come and go. But the grief remains, living quietly in the hearts of those who refuse to let Alex’s story fade into the endless cycle of outrage and forgetting.

Writing about this doesn’t bring him back. It doesn’t make sense of an act that should never have happened. But it does remind us that bearing witness is part of who we are. To see, to feel, to remember—these are small acts of resistance against the numbness that violence tries to plant in us.

And even in sorrow, the words of the nation’s founders find their way back to relevance. They wrote that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” Those words were not written for moments of comfort, but for times like this—when justice feels too far away, and humanity demands accountability not out of anger, but out of love for what’s been lost.

So we grieve, and we remember Alex Pretti—not as a headline, not as a symbol, but as a man whose life mattered. We remember him because looking away is a luxury that conscience can’t afford.

There is no closure in loss, only the hope that awareness can still mean something. And maybe that’s all we can offer: to name what happened truthfully, to hold space for those left behind, and to keep believing that compassion still has a place in the public square.

So maybe, the only path forward for writers, journalists, citizens, and all humans. We must stay conscious. We must refuse to look away, even when the pain pours out of eyes. We should insist on empathy not as sentiment but as duty, so they are not forgotten.

There is no tidy ending here. No “moving on.” The story doesn’t close—it lingers in every conscience willing to stay present. The question is whether we’ll keep naming what’s in front of us, even when it hurts to look at the truth.

@Janie

@alvarezjanie

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