Bay Area health care workers hold vigil for Alex Pretti
By Amanda Hari
Dozens of Highland Hospital health care workers gathered on the sidewalk outside the hospital to hold a vigil for Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse who was shot and killed by U.S. Border Control Agents in Minneapolis.
Those at the vigil sang the Woody Guthrie classic, “This Land is Your Land,” a message of inclusion and equality, in response to the tragedy.
For first-year emergency medicine resident Allison Leopold, Alex Pretti’s death hits close to home because she is from Minneapolis.
“I’ve been seeing the videos day in, day out, my friends being brutalized, my loved ones,” Leopold explained.
She said she feels that in Pretti’s final moments, he was doing what he was driven to do: protect.
“It speaks to our role as health care workers and society, at large,” said Leopold. “Our role is not just to protect patients in the walls of the hospital, it’s to protect our communities, and Alex Pretti was doing just that. Just as he was trained.”
Marina Stankov is a labor and delivery nurse at Highland, but one of her closest friends lives in Minnesota. She knows a friend of Pretti’s, who shared a message about him on social media.
“Al, Alex Pretti was the glue guy in our friend group,” said Stankov, reading the post about Pretti. “He had a unique relationship with all of us. He was a phenomenal listener, and you felt heard while talking with him about anything. He was fearless on adventures and loved life.”
Although Stankov didn’t know him herself, she wanted to share the words she had read about him.
“It just humanizes him,” said Stankov. “They’re trying to mischaracterize every single person that they murder at this point, and so it needs to be out there.”
Leopold led the vigil. She said being from Minneapolis, she felt a responsibility to step up.
“I was able to go home last week, which was really fortunate,” said Leopold. “I could witness firsthand the violence of the occupation and also the beauty of the resistance, and just spreading that and speaking of that outside of Minneapolis seems really important right now.”
Hospital workers also gathered for similar vigils at UCSF, Stanford, and other hospitals across the country.
