Nurses and Columbia residents gathered on the sidewalk of the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital to honor Alex Pretti Sunday evening. The crowd held signs and candles to honor the ICU nurse who was killed in Minneapolis by a U.S. Border Patrol officer.
The vigil, organized nationally by the American Federation of Government Employees, aimed to honor Pretti as a nurse and a member of Local 3669. Lindsay Browning, president of AMGE Local 3669 in Columbia, stressed that the vigil was a memorial, not a political statement.
“This is just about remembering his life and who he was,” Browning said. “But at the same time, there’s a whole lot of turmoil in general going on in the world, and this is what we’re doing to bring the community together and to support each other as we go through this.”
Turnout was significantly higher than Browning had expected, with around 50 people attending the vigil. Attendees held candles and sang songs, including “Amazing Grace” and “This Little Light of Mine.”
“This is what being a union member is about,” Browning said. “This is what being a federal employee is about, and our federal employees have been very attacked this year, and this is standing up for one of us.”
Although the organizers intended for the celebration to be mostly isolated from politics, some attendees, including Rebecca Culley, wanted the vigil to have a purpose beyond memorializing Pretti.
Culley said she hoped the vigil would create something positive from a lost life.
“I am a nurse, and going from America’s heroes five years ago, wearing masks to save … to [seeing] that there are masks being worn in order to kill people, and that is a travesty and a tragedy that I do not think America is built on,” Culley said.
