At Pretti Killing Scene, DHS Blocks Minnesota BCA Despite Judge-Signed Warrant; Police Chief O'Hara Says Scene Was Contaminated and HSI Takes Over Self-Investigation

At the scene of the January 24, 2026 killing of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents near Nicollet Avenue and East 26th Street in Minneapolis, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security physically blocked Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) agents from accessing the crime scene — the agency that, under Minnesota law, investigates all law-enforcement use-of-force incidents in the state. BCA crime-scene personnel arrived within roughly 30 minutes and posted that they “attempted to access the location but were blocked by @DHSgov personnel at the scene.” The BCA obtained a judge-signed search warrant at 11:54 a.m. and returned, but was blocked again. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” the next day, said state investigators “more than once… were not permitted to enter before the scene then was contaminated.”

The contamination concern was concrete: the BCA flagged that Pretti’s firearm appeared to have been handled improperly, citing a DHS social-media photo that showed the handgun lying on a car seat. A former Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) official called the crime scene “compromised,” warning that the spoiling of evidence could undermine any future civil-rights investigation. Rather than yield jurisdiction to the state, the federal government installed itself as its own investigator: FBI Director Kash Patel stated “all the pieces of the investigation are being led by DHS in HSI” — ICE’s investigative arm probing the conduct of a sister DHS agency, Border Patrol, a configuration current and former officials described as highly unusual. Minnesota responded by obtaining a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from destroying or altering evidence removed from the scene.

Structurally, this is the accountability blockade established at its origin point — not in the later February 16 FBI document denial, but in the first hours, at the body. The pattern is self-sealing: federal agents kill, federal agents seize the scene, federal agents exclude the only neutral state investigator (even one carrying a judicial warrant), the scene is degraded, and then a DHS sub-agency is named to investigate DHS. Each step forecloses the next layer of external review. O’Hara’s “contaminated” and the HSI official’s “compromised” name the mechanism plainly: by the time any independent body could examine the evidence, the evidence has been curated by the entity under examination. This is the scene-level seed of the documented Operation Metro Surge state-lockout pattern that later hardened into the formal FBI evidence denial (see 2026-02-16--fbi-denies-minnesota-bca-evidence-pretti-case).