Twin Cities resident Stella Carlson, the woman wearing a pink jacket seen in videos filming Alex Pretti’s death in Minnesota, told CNN in an interview on Tuesday that federal officers examined Pretti’s body “like a deer” after his death to see how many times he was shot.
“I watched him die,” Carlson told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in her first interview since the shooting.
Carlson came forward to the cable news network after she was seen in multiple videos filming the incident in Minneapolis on Saturday, when Border Patrol agents brought Pretti down as he was helping a woman knocked down by agents. The agents then removed Pretti’s gun, which he had not brandished, before shooting him multiple times, killing him and launching a national firestorm over the federal government’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
Carlson said she revealed herself because it was something she and other protesters hoped federal agents would do.
“America wants the truth, and I want people to know who I am, so I’m not just the pink jacket lady and that I represent all of us,” she said. “We all have a story, and we all have a reason in which we decide to go to the street and open our phones and video record, and I just feel called to be somebody, to show my face and represent that we ask that ICE agents and all of the people in the streets who are infiltrating and making us unsafe to do the same thing.”
Carlson said that she did not know Pretti had a gun on him, otherwise she would not have gotten so close to him to film the incident. But as she saw Pretti arch his back and his head roll back, her experience watching people die in hospice settings led her to believe he wouldn’t survive.
“I knew he was gone because I watched it,” she said. “And then they come over to try to perform some type of medical aid by ripping his clothes open with scissors, and then maneuvering his body around like a rag doll, only to discover that it could be because they wanted to count the bullet wounds to see how many they got, like he’s a deer.”
But her belief in protesting grew after Renee Good’s death earlier this month.
“If it wasn’t for the collective actions over the past three weeks, I don’t know if I would have been able to stay that long,” she said. “But I knew that this was a moment, and we all have to be brave and we all have to take risks, and we’re all going to be given moments to make that decision.”
Pretti’s death has led to a rolling de-escalation of the federal government’s response in Minnesota. Border Patrol commander at large Greg Bovino left the city, replaced instead by border czar Tom Homan, and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller have come under White House scrutiny over their initial statements after Pretti was killed.
Watch part of Carlson’s interview here: