What makes that video so unbearable to watch isn’t only that an ICE agent killed Alex Pretti. It’s that in the middle of being shoved, struck, and repeatedly blasted in the face with chemical spray, his body kept doing one thing: reaching.

Reaching for a woman who had just been knocked down. Reaching for clarity through the burning in his eyes. Reaching to put himself between her and whatever was coming next. You can see that he is disoriented, choking, and staggering but still his instinct is PROTECTION.

He isn’t posturing or trying to be a hero for a camera. He’s trying to focus so he can shield somebody else. His nervous system is under assault, his vision is blurred, his lungs are on fire, and yet his moral center doesn’t collapse inward. It expands outward toward another human being in danger.

Maybe he knew her. Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. But that’s almost beside the point. What the footage shows is a man whose first reflex under state violence was not self-preservation at all costs, but solidarity. Care. The ancient, almost forgotten impulse to say, “you are not going to face this alone.”

That is what makes his killing so devastating. The state didn’t just shoot a protester. It shot someone in the act of trying to protect a woman. It shot a man whose last visible choice was compassion. Whose final posture was not aggression, but guardianship.

And that is the deepest obscenity of the footage. It’s watching a system built on force extinguish a body that was, even in terror, still reaching for love. Damn.