I grew up with Alex Peretti

On the day Alex Peretti was shot 10 times in the street by federal agents, I was delivering a eulogy for my grandfather, who died the way we’re supposed to: old, asleep, surrounded by his family. Because my job is to curate photos for this site, I locked myself in the bathroom, watched video of the shooting twice, and emailed one of the photographers, asking if he could take to the streets and start documenting what was happening in Minneapolis.

As I reviewed images of protesters and tear gas in the wake of his death, I did not realize, in the hours before his name was made public, that the man whom millions of people had seen lying face down on the pavement from multiple angles from eyewitness video was my childhood best friend.

We have become accustomed to being bombarded with videos of people we don’t know being arrested, taken from their families, and beaten by agents whose salaries we pay. As social media does its job of piecing together bits and pieces about each day of the unfolding tragedy, more and more of us will realize that these pieces belong to someone we know.

Alex and I grew up across the street in a quiet neighborhood in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a football-obsessed town with not much to do. The street we live on was recently a field, now inhabited by a few three-bedroom houses quickly built in a treeless subdivision. I met Alex when he was three and I was four. Our families’ lives were very clear to each other, without fences or a lot of foliage, and we knew the comings and goings of each other’s families.

Alex was an easy playmate: generous, curious and kind. His mother always made sure he had a neat haircut and a clean room. He had a younger sister. He told me the truth about Santa, and I told him the truth about where children come from.

We skateboarded and slept outside, excitedly dragging our sleeping bags across the street from house to house. We built stately forts in the snow piles after the plows passed. Summer lawn sprinklers become portals to different worlds and time periods. We ran through lines of water with towels tied around our necks like sarongs. When Alex opened his bedroom window, I heard him singing all the way through my open window. His voice was operatic and powerful, carrying over the drones of leaf blowers and lawnmowers. He loved tangerines and macaroni and cheese, and we agreed it was especially fun when all the food on our plates was orange.

Over the past few days, I’ve seen a lot of posts on social media about how you don’t have to watch the video, and how it’s a good idea to protect yourself from it, because we don’t need to watch another public execution. But when news agency A journalist called his parents after their son was shot. They didn’t hear the news. The journalist sent them the video, and they said he looked like their son.

There is something destabilizing about knowing someone as a child and then hearing that they were gunned down in the street. The person you see in your mind lying on that street is still a child. I’m sure his mother feels that way too, or sees him in all ages at once, including the ones he never lived to see.

After Alex was wrestled to the ground, and after a federal agent pulled the trigger and Alex stopped, nine more shots were fired into his body. I keep reading reports that there was a struggle before the first shot, but all I see is someone trying to keep his head up off the ground while seven masked men surround him and beat him. Certainly, through his training as an ICU nurse, he knew it was important to protect his head. One time in the old neighborhood, when he was seven or eight, he fell off his bike, and his helmet split in half like a cantaloupe. He showed the halves to all the neighbor kids as a way to warn them not to ride without one.

The lies being spread about him by the most powerful people in America stand in stark contrast to anyone watching the videos. He doesn’t reach for his weapon in his waistband, which he had the legal right to carry, and which the agent took away from him before they killed him. He was not approaching the officers when they pepper-sprayed him and threw him to the ground. He was helping a woman who had been pushed to the curb by those same agents.

My family moved when I started high school, and Alex’s mother asked to talk to me before we left. She wanted to understand how she could stay close to her son and keep him safe while allowing him the freedom to grow as he grew older. She wondered if it would be okay to ask him to check in when he goes somewhere new with friends. Would these friends make fun of him or admit that he was popular?

Another video that has gone viral is Alex It shows him giving the final salute For an ICU patient at the VA hospital where he worked. Alex speaks in a low, reverent tone in front of a flag-draped body, showing the same compassion we saw in footage of him helping a woman pushed to the ground by federal agents. It’s the same tenor of his voice in his final words: Are you well?