Alex Pretti shouldn’t have brought gun to ICE protest, SLO County DA says
San Luis Obispo County District Attorney Dan Dow appeared on a local radio show last week to comment on the deaths of two protesters by immigration agents, saying the second person, Alex Pretti, shouldn’t have brought a gun to the scene.
Dow was a guest on Barry Fisher’s KPRL radio show, “Protecting What Matters,” on Jan. 27, the same day as the Board of Supervisors’ TRUTH Act forum. Their discussion focused on anti-ICE protests in Minnesota and the killing of Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis.
Pretti, who worked as an ICU nurse at a veterans hospital, was killed on Jan. 24 when a Border Patrol agent shot him 10 times while he was recording the officers’ activity on a Minneapolis street.
Multiple videos of the incident published and analyzed by the New York Times and others showed Pretti approaching two ICE agents with a phone in his hand. Pretti then tried to place himself between the agents and a protester they had pushed to the ground, before agents pepper-sprayed him and pinned him to the pavement. When they discovered he had a holstered gun, one agent disarmed Pretti before two others fatally shot him, the video showed.
On the radio, Dow said he hadn’t watched any videos of the shooting. But he said Pretti shouldn’t have brought a gun to the protest, as ICE agents would see it as a threat, Dow said.
“I don’t know what was going through this person’s mind, but chances are, he thought, ‘Hey, I’m going to be a little bit of a cowboy, and if they get violent, and I determine that they’re doing something unlawful, I’m going to take out my gun and do what I am going to do,’” Dow said.
“He didn’t have all of his brain cells firing, because if he did, he would know that would immediately be perceived as a threat, a deadly threat, against them,” he added.
Dow told The Tribune that he supported Pretti’s Second Amendment right to carry a firearm with the appropriate license.
However, he said in an email that it was a bad idea to “to go to a highly charged protest with a loaded gun in your belt, because in that setting officers are forced to interpret any apparent access to a firearm as a potential deadly threat, and they have a right to go home safely to their families.”
“I still believe he should have left his gun at home as a matter of prudence and public safety, not because he lacked a constitutional right, but because that choice significantly increased the risk of a tragic outcome,” Dow added in his email.
He encouraged all people to leave firearms at home when attending “large, emotionally charged demonstrations” to promote safety.
Dow had a similar reaction to the killing of Renee Good. In January, he shared social media posts on X that defended the ICE agent who fatally shot Good, and he wrote that using force against a law enforcement officer “may be the very last thing you ever do.”
District attorney advises people to watch out for fake videos
As of Tuesday afternoon, Dow had still not watched a full video of the shooting, he said.
“That is not out of disinterest, but because I am otherwise very limited in time that I can devote to things other than my job and family,” he wrote in an email to The Tribune. “If I were to have the time, I am always very careful as a prosecutor about how and when I review evidence in high‑profile, emotionally charged cases. Short clips circulating on social media rarely provide the full context needed to fairly evaluate a complex use‑of‑force incident, and I do not believe it is responsible to form or adjust official opinions based on partial information.”
On the radio, Dow told listeners to be wary of AI videos and instead refer to the Department of Homeland Security’s statements about Pretti’s death.
“The left, immediately with the last person — Renee Good — when she was shot, they immediately jumped to conclusions and said she was murdered before the facts were gathered,” Dow said. “That’s what they’ve done again with this one, people rushing to judgment.”
Dow encouraged people to wait for the federal government to complete the investigation into the shooting before drawing conclusions about what happened.
“Why don’t we all, everybody — the left, the right — why don’t we let the investigation go forward?” he asked.
He said the federal government will handle the investigation similarly to the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office, which investigates officer-involved shootings that occur in San Luis Obispo County.
“We do a thorough, independent, unbiased, objective investigation, and at the end of it, we release a full report, and we describe exactly what happened, who was there, how it happened, and what our conclusion is, whether or not it was a lawful use of force,” he said. “I know that will happen here.”
When The Tribune asked Dow why he commented on the shooting before federal authorities released the results of their investigation, he said he joined the talk show to discuss more general issues, like “respect for law enforcement” and “the dangers of highly charged protests.”
“It is part of honest public leadership to warn against lawlessness, to call for support of officers who ‘have a right to go home at night to their families,’ and to urge patience and due process, all while making clear that the ultimate factual and legal determinations must rest on a complete evidentiary record, not on a talk‑show appearance,” he wrote in the email.
Dow said on the radio that politicians like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey should encourage protesters to write their Congress members and picket on street corners — not interfere with ICE operations.
“The left always encourages disorder,” Dow said. “... The far left knows nothing other than using physical force to bully people into getting what they want done.”
Meanwhile, Dow noted that conservatives didn’t protest the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley by a Venezuelan immigrant who entered the country without the proper documents — saying that conservatives “react very differently.”
Dow calls some anti-ICE protesters ‘useful idiots’
Dow called the anti-ICE protests “highly organized” and “sophisticated,” while being funded by “people like George Soros that have a lot of money that, frankly, want to sow dissension. They want to sow chaos into American culture and society.”
However, in an email to The Tribune he said he did not have an “evidentiary record” to prove that outside funders were coordinating the San Luis Obispo County anti-ICE protests.
On the radio, he continued: “There’s a lot of people out there that, hey, a good friend of mine recently used the term that will probably be offensive to somebody. It’s called useful idiots. ...”
“There are people out there that are co-opted and used by people with an agenda,” he added. “And they feed them enough information without all the legalities of it to cause them to immediately grab onto it and then to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to go and join up with that.’”
In his email, Dow said he doesn’t view all anti-ICE protesters as “useful idiots.”
“I was not saying that everyone who has concerns about ICE, immigration policy, or sanctuary laws is a ‘useful idiot,’ nor was I branding all opponents as stupid or malicious; many of my constituents hold sincere, good‑faith views with which I may strongly disagree, and yet I respect their right to protest peacefully,” he wrote. “The phrase was directed at those who unwittingly allow themselves to be drawn into efforts that cross the line into obstructing lawful federal officers, ‘engaging them violently,’ or promoting ‘disorder’ instead of lawful advocacy.”
Meanwhile, Dow said he supported the First Amendment right to protest.
“We want people to be able to have free speech,” he said. “Free speech does not include the right to obstruct, the right to abuse a peace officer in the commission of their duties or to interfere with what they’re doing. And all of this chaos is at the hands of the far extreme left in Minneapolis. And I’m afraid it’s, you know, it’s also being encouraged here in California by the far-left politicians that have an agenda.”
This aligned with Dow’s previous comments.
On Jan. 15, Dow released a statement to share that he supports protests if they obey state and federal law, but he will prosecute “unlawful” protest behavior.
In that same statement, he said ICE-free zones are symbolic and they don’t override federal law.
He repeated this sentiment on the radio show, calling sanctuary states, counties and cities “a fairy tale land.”
“We don’t get to pick and choose which laws apply here in San Luis Obispo or in California, just because we say we don’t like what the federal government does,” he said.
This story was originally published February 3, 2026 at 3:32 PM.
