The contrast couldn’t have been starker. One moment, photographer Steven Garcia was standing on a frozen lake covering a pond hockey event. The next, he was getting a notification about a shooting that would send him racing back to Minneapolis, where he’d spend the evening documenting protests, tear gas, and a community that had learned painful lessons from 2020.
When Garcia arrived at the scene more than three hours after the shooting of Alex Pretti, federal officers had already cleared out. The FBI had done their investigation and left. What remained was a mix of state and local law enforcement: Minneapolis PD, SWAT teams, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, and Minnesota State Patrol.
Streets Blocked, Tensions Rising
Protesters had taken over multiple intersections. Trash cans and dumpsters formed makeshift barricades. Mattresses lay scattered on the ground in what seemed like a deliberate strategy to slow any police advance. The demonstrators were vocal, heckling the officers, but Garcia noted there were no physical confrontations happening at that point.
Then law enforcement made their move. They pulled back by a block and started deploying tear gas. Lots of it.
The canisters make a distinctive sound when they go off, Garcia explains. They pop and bang like fireworks, but what follows is nothing like a celebration. Dozens of canisters were being deployed simultaneously. Four, five, six at a time in those initial moments. Even Garcia, who presumably had some protective gear, had to take cover in an alley when the gas penetrated his mask.
The 2020 Muscle Memory
Here’s where the story takes an interesting turn that speaks to both resilience and tragedy. The community was ready. Not because they wanted to be, but because they’d been through this before with George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
Gregory Bovino, the head of US Border Patrol stationed in Minneapolis, apparently acknowledged this himself. He said community members there are “really prepared,” which is a strange thing to have to say about civilians facing down technology designed for crowd control and chemical weapons.
People Garcia talked to said things like “I had my respirator ready from 2020.” They’d simply restocked their supplies: decon wipes, first aid kits, safety equipment. It’s become part of the business of protesting in Minneapolis, if you can call it that. Tables were set up at every event Garcia attended, offering food, water, and hand warmers. Especially important when temperatures weren’t expected to climb above zero degrees.
What does it say about a place when its residents have to maintain protest gear the way other people maintain emergency preparedness kits?
A Vigil in Pinecones
After law enforcement drove their trucks over those mattresses and cleared the area, protesters regrouped at the intersection of 26th and Nicolette. Just a couple hundred feet from where Alex Pretti had been shot earlier that day.
Community members started building a makeshift vigil right there at the spot where he was killed. They spelled out his name using pinecones. Flowers began to appear as word spread and more people arrived.
Garcia’s account captures something raw about how communities process violence and state response in real time. There’s no time to plan or organize in any formal sense. People just know what to do because they’ve had to do it before. They know where to find their respirators, how to set up mutual aid stations, how to create a memorial out of whatever materials are at hand.
The tear gas burns your eyes and mouth, causes nausea, leaves some people with burning sensations on their skin. One reporter told Garcia his neck was burning badly enough that he needed decon wipes. This is the experience of documenting news in America in 2026, where the tools of war get deployed on city streets and both journalists and citizens have learned to expect it.
It’s hard to know what’s more disturbing: that this happened, or that everyone was so well-prepared for it to happen again.
