She Watched Agents Kill Alex Pretti From The Backseat Of An ICE Vehicle. Now She Can Share What She Saw.

Attorneys for Wynnie Savageford, a woman who watched in real time as immigration agents shot Alex Pretti to death in Minneapolis this January, revealed that she has met with the investigators from the FBI and Justice Department for a witness interview.

It’s been a hard road to this moment, her attorney James Cook told HuffPost on Friday.

Negotiations for the interview were in the works for weeks as Cook secured immunity for Savageford so she could testify freely and without fear of retribution as the probe is underway.

“She saw him get killed. She’s been freaked out by it and she’s been experiencing some trauma,” he said. “And these days, if you’re a witness to this sort of thing, you never know if the administration is going to come after you.

The interview, Cook said, is part of the federal government’s ongoing probe into Pretti’s killing on Jan. 24. Savageford sat for two hours with investigators on Wednesday, and while Cook could not disclose the specifics, he confirmed that much of what she said echoed her remarks during a press conference in March.

Savageford was a legal observer of ICE officers in the Whittier neighborhood where Pretti was killed. She said agents approached her; she asked to see a warrant; they ignored her and then pushed her twice, causing her to fall. She told reporters in March that when she was tackled, agents knelt on her back and tightly handcuffed her before taking her to one of their vehicles. She said she was “picked up by my legs” and “thrown into the car headfirst.”

She was in the backseat of the vehicle as she watched agents kill Pretti.

“At that moment I thought I was going to die, too. I pleaded with agents to understand why another life was taken and please not take mine. I was told to shut the fuck up and stop being hysterical,” she said in March.

After Pretti was killed, Savageford, who is Asian-American, said she was taken to a warehouse near the Whipple detention center where immigrants were being detained. She was strip-searched, including by male agents who Cook told HuffPost on Friday were “touching her privates.”

“They mistook her for being from somewhere south of the border and they started to process her until one of the agents said, ‘Hey, she’s a U.S. citizen’ before they sent her off. They just assumed she was an undocumented immigrant because she’s brown,” he said.

Once inside Whipple, Savageford says agents taunted her and asked who was “paying” her to protest.

She was released without being charged but Savageford was held for 12 hours in a freezing cell without access to food, water or a bathroom “unless you banged on the window long enough,” she told reporters this spring.

Speaking of Pretti in March, Savageford said she did not know him, but knew when he went to defend her on Jan. 24 that he “had her back.”

“I knew the kind of heart he had: the kind that loves and protects without limits,” she said. “That day haunts me forever. That trauma will be with me for the rest of my life and I will never be the same.”

Cook told HuffPost Friday that other witnesses will be interviewing with the government in the weeks ahead.

“They will probably all say the same: The agents shot Pretti and didn’t know what to do. They didn’t have a plan if they killed somebody. They were really coming and asking each other: ‘What should we do now?’ They had no first aid… when they finally called an ambulance, they really didn’t know what to do,” he said.

Cook said there should be “one big takeaway” about the agents involved after witness interviews are completed.

“It just seemed like they weren’t well trained and it was a huge amount of incompetence,” he said.

Video footage captured by bystanders on their cell phones shows officers firing at least 10 shots at Pretti, 37, in a matter of seconds. Pretti, an ICU nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs, was filming federal agents interacting with two civilians, including when an agent appeared to push a woman to the ground. Pretti tried to put himself between them and the officers and was doused with a chemical irritant. Footage showed Pretti trying to help a woman off the ground as he continued to be sprayed. Finally, he was surrounded by multiple agents and forced to the ground.

Video shows Pretti’s hands were empty when agents had him on the ground. Footage showed an agent appearing to pull a gun off Pretti’s hip one second before the shooting started. The agent who removed the gun appeared to be moving away from the scene when, at the same time, another agent pulled out his own weapon and pointed it at Pretti’s back. On his knees and already restrained, Pretti was then fired on four times. At least six more shots followed, according to a comprehensive timeline the New York Times completed.

Customs and Border Protection agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez were later identified as the shooters.

A day after Pretti was killed, then deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the conduct of ICE officers in Minneapolis, saying they were acting “humanely” when responding to aggressive anti-ICE protesters.

Pretti’s execution-style killing came just weeks after Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was killed by ICE officer Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7 as she drove away from a protest. (Ross was put on a three-day leave before being moved to work in an administrative capacity in another state.)

Blanche told reporters less than a week after Pretti’s death that the DOJ’s civil rights division would open a probe. A separate internal investigation was also opened into Pretti’s shooting by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. The department declined to comment.

As for Good, the Justice Department has declined to open a civil rights probe into her death and instead left it to the FBI to investigate. In April, however, as HuffPost reported, the FBI probe into Good had stalled. The FBI did not return a request for comment on Friday.

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, state and local prosecutors said that the federal government had refused to share information or evidence with them. This prompted Minnesota to sue for access to evidence related to Pretti and Good’s deaths as well as the nonfatal shooting of Venezuelan immigrant and Minnesota resident Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis on Jan. 14.

(Sosa-Celis was injured after ICE officer Christian Castro shot him in the leg. Castro was charged by state prosecutors in May with multiple counts of assault and falsely reporting a crime. After federal prosecutors similarly charged him in September, he turned himself in.)

It was not until July that the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota began sharing key evidence with the state and local investigators, according to Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.

Moriarty told the Associated Press that hard drives containing witness statements, police body camera video and even Good’s damaged car were shared with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

For now, Cook wouldn’t say whether Savageford or other witnesses will consider suing the government for injury or damages.

But if they do, he said, he has an inkling of what the government’s response will be.

“If we do get into a litigation situation, the defense is going to need qualified immunity for every single one of those agents,” Cook said.

He said he fully expects agents to respond to possible allegations by saying “I was just following orders.”

“Or they will say, ‘How was I supposed to know I was violating a constitutional right?’” Cook said.

Immigration agents must follow strict protocols and procedures around the use of force and firearms while on duty. Training materials obtained by HuffPost in February suggest ICE officers failed to follow even the most basic steps when it came to Good.

In his decade-plus experience as a lawyer, Cook said investigations take time and the average investigation can last a year. For every piece of evidence offered, multiple rules must be followed, and the timeline can shift, but he believes things are “moving relatively fast.”

“I’m optimistic,” he said. “I’ve sat on the other side of the table with the FBI and it’s always been adversarial. This hasn’t been. And I’m optimistic because of that.”