They Killed the Helper
Marie - A VA nurse, a murdered colleague, and the parking lot that became a war zone.
What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.
If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.
I wish I could bring my gun to work.
A cluster of protesters screamed at her. Did they assume she was ICE?
I can’t believe I just thought that.
Marie shakes her head, trying to shake the idea out of her brain. She is a licensed gun owner, but she has never, ever, carried her gun in public. It stays locked in its case at home.
Do I need to wear a sign that says “I’m a nurse”?
Instead of just having her keys out ready to unlock the car as soon as she gets within range, she has started holding one of the keys wedged between her fingers, a potential weapon, just in case.
I can’t believe I am holding my keys like this. I’m a nurse. My job is to heal people, not harm them with my keys!
Before the surge, this was just a normal employee parking lot, an extension of the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. But somehow this average parking lot had turned into a place where Marie had to be on high alert. She’d always been one to pay attention to who’s sitting in a parked car with the engine running, who was walking the same direction as she was, and the distance between herself and the nearest lit entrance. Like all women, Marie has been doing this math her whole life, but during the surge, the calculation had become much more complex.
The old math was simple: Is that person a threat to me?
The new math had variables she was never trained for: Is that person ICE? Is that person a protester? Is that person someone who, like me, just works here? And the unknown variable that changed everything, who do these people think I am?
Her building sits directly across from the Whipple Federal Building, ICE’s Minneapolis headquarters and detention center. Before the surge, the parking lot was a nothing-space. She parked, she walked, she went inside. She recognized the majority of the cars parking there, and she knew many of the people who walked the lot with her.
After the surge started, there were fifty or more cars and dozens of people she didn’t know. She didn’t trust any of them, and she wondered if any of them trusted her.
She is a nurse. Her job is to serve every single one of them with the same compassion. The veteran, the protester, the federal agent — if any of them collapsed in this parking lot right now, Marie would be the one running toward them.
But no one in this parking lot knows that.
Inside, sitting quietly at her desk, on the phone with a veteran, Marie jumped out of her seat when the first bang cut through the wall.
Was that gunshots?
It wasn’t. It was flashbangs fired by ICE agents in the parking lot, just outside the building where Marie sat with a veteran’s file open on her screen. The same parking lot she’d just crossed with a key between her fingers. The nothing-space was no longer nothing. She looked out the window at clouds of smoke. She’d never seen an actual war-zone before, but this is what she’d imagined it might look like.
Marie abruptly ended her patient call and promised to call him back.
“We are taking care of veterans,” she said to no one in particular, “Giving them our best. And they are disrupting how we care.”
She stopped speaking, stared off into space for more than a moment, knowing she was talking to the no one. And then she continued, because her words needed to go somewhere.
“What do they expect the outcome to be?”
The next day, her supervisor told her to work-from-home.
She didn’t know when she’d go back.
When Marie saw the video of Alex’s death on social media, she could hear the helicopters overhead indicating this was close. Nine blocks close.
Marie thought working from home would be safer, but now, with Alex’s death in her own neighborhood, nowhere was safe anymore.
She watched it once. Then she watched it again. Then she did what we all did that Saturday, she scrolled, looking for the next piece of information to arrive, hoping the details that might make the thing she’d just watched make sense, even though we all knew that nothing was going to make it make sense.
He was 37.
His name was Alex Pretti.
He had seen a woman being pushed to the ground by ICE agents, and he had run toward her.
He was a nurse.
. . . Marie stopped scrolling. . .
He was a VA nurse.
. . . She set her phone down. . .
He was her colleague.
. . .
He was her colleague. . .
She had never met Alex Pretti, but that didn’t matter. She knew him the way every nurse knows every other nurse.
Alex Pretti ran toward a woman who needed him, just like any and every nurse would do, out of instinct, training, and automatic reflex.
And they shot him for it.
She paused the recording.
They killed the helper.
Her thumb hovering over the play button.
They murdered the helper.
That could’ve been ME!
When the VA announced the memorial service for Alex Pretti, Marie joined on Teams from her kitchen table, with Grief sitting next to her, a cold hand on the rim of her tea-cup.
Her laptop screen filled with faces, over a thousand of them.
The room on the other end was packed — standing room, people crowded in doorways as the online boxes kept multiplying, name after name, department after department, colleagues she recognized and colleagues she didn’t, all of them logged on from nurses’ stations and break rooms and desks and home offices, all of them doing the same thing Marie was doing: stopping.
She wondered if even the custodians and the nursing assistants were able to stop and watch from their phones in the middle of the shifts. Did the whole hospital, every floor, every unit, every function, stop for this moment? Did the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, a federal institution that runs on schedules and shifts and the absolute non-negotiable forward motion of patient care, completely stop?
It did.
Alex’s nurse manager spoke first. She was emotional, and she didn’t try to hide it. No one tried to hide it, which is remarkable in a building where the job requires you to hold yourself together in front of people who are falling apart.
And then the VA Nurse Honor Guard came forward.
Marie watched them enter the room in their traditional nurse uniforms including the white caps that no one wears anymore. Each one held a Florence Nightingale candle, a callback to the Nightingale ceremony given for all new nurse graduates.
The Honor Guard lit the candle.
One of them stepped forward and the room went quiet, both in-person and online, a thousand people holding the moment in noble silence.
Alex Pretti, RN —
She read his license number..
— report to duty.
A bell rang.
Alex Pretti, RN, report to duty.
The bell rang again.
And then the third time.
Alex Pretti, RN.
You are . . . released from duty.
The bell rang.
The candle went out.
Silence.
Everyone was listening.
This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.
It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.
If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.
If you want to support this effort, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers will receive full chapters (not just excerpts) with my author’s commentary about my process and experience at least once a month.
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That’s how this works.
That’s how we work.
I love you fiercely,
TeriLeigh 💜
Such a powerful piece. So sorry for your loss Terri.
Oh I’m sobbing. Thank you for sharing this.