"My Country Killed My Classmate" Once, I knew Alex Pretti. We weren’t close friends, and my memories of Alex are cobwebbed by the twenty years separating our graduation from Green Bay Preble High School in 2006 and his death at the hands of border patrol agents in 2026. But what I do remember about Alex is important, especially as my country’s government seeks to bend the reality of his death away from the truth we all witnessed. In high school, I was a closeted teenager just trying to blend in with my straight friends and classmates. To my face, my peers were mostly kind, but I knew what people wondered behind my back, heard their whispers hiss down the halls, could feel when I was a curiosity to them. Patronized by the girls, scrutinized by the boys. But never by Alex. He wasn’t the school’s kingpin, nor did he care, I think, about his own popularity. But he did have an uncanny ability to move between those at the top and the bottom of the social pyramid, somehow offering to everyone genuine friendship, connection, and empathy. He ran track and played football, which placed him among the school’s enviable jocks. Instead of succumbing to that stereotype’s restrictions, however, Alex never hid his other passions, especially for the performing arts. He split his time between the locker room and the stage, between wearing a football helmet and a musical’s costumes. Those two groups—the jocks and the theater kids—didn’t exactly have a lot in common. But they did have Alex, and whichever group claimed him during their particular season loved him because he was one of them.
I felt that way about Alex, too. I ran track with him, and our social circles overlapped such that we spent some time together among mutual friends. What I most strongly remember about Alex is that I felt something rare in his company: a lack of suspicion, a disinterest in gossip, a commitment to kindness. He didn’t judge and had nothing to prove, a combination that was inspiring to me when I raced alongside him during track practice and when I applauded as he bowed during a curtain call. Alex never cared what people said about boys who did musicals, and his confidence felt like a proxy for how I might feel about myself someday. I don’t know that I’ve spoken to Alex since we graduated in 2006. I don’t know much about his life over those two decades beyond what I’ve now read in the news and have seen posted on social media. But what I can imagine is that, when we were both seventeen, robed in our school’s green graduation gowns and on the cusp of adulthood, he was as excited by the possibilities awaiting him as I was. For me, those possibilities became coming out, getting married, teaching and writing, adopting my daughter. Alex’s possibilities became serving others as an ICU nurse, exploring the wilderness, loving his dog, and being shot in the street by his government. As Alex crossed our graduation stage and the clock for his remaining twenty years started ticking, I doubt his imaginings included the Secretary of Homeland Security labeling him a “domestic terrorist,” the Border Patrol’s Commander-at-Large accusing him of intending to “massacre law enforcement,” or a Congressman celebrating that an “insurrectionist was put down. Well done.” Nobody graduating high school should imagine these impossibilities that have become not just possible, but increasingly probable. Nobody should imagine being killed by his own government.
But we now live in a country whose reins have been seized by leaders shirking all accountability and delighting in cruelty, and these very same leaders would rather poison Alex’s memory than admit their grave wrongdoing. That this administration is so callous, however, becomes an odd enforcer of Alex’s goodness: their compulsion to lie has inspired others to scream the truth. Alex was a violent man seeking trouble at a protest? Thank you to his colleagues at the VA Hospital who have shared with the world Alex’s devotion to dying veterans. Alex got what was coming because he was lawfully armed? Thank you to those who remind us that the Second Amendment isn’t just a convenience for some Americans, but a right for all Americans. Alex was an insurrectionist, a seditionist, a man intent on slaughtering officers? Thank you to his family, friends, neighbors, and classmates who are telling the truth about the good man we knew in our own ways, that we remember for his kindness, for his empathy, for his ability to make people feel like themselves. We must keep telling these truths about Alex, a boy who once gathered his high school diploma, stepped down from his graduation stage, and walked into the eventuality that his own country would claim his life.
Full text of this powerful post by a high school classmate of Alex Pretti.
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