I want to publically commend North Carolina’s senior Senator, Thom Tillis, for speaking out on the need for a “thorough and impartial investigation” into the death of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this weekend. On one hand, it seems kind of ridiculous that such a stand is worthy of notice. For most of my adult life, it would be obvious that if an unarmed American citizen who was not committing any crime was killed by US law enforcement agents, of course there would be an investigation. Even if there was no potential legal issues, our expectation is that the government would want to find out what went wrong and to correct such issues so that no other citizens would be needlessly killed in the future.

However, this is not the case in our current Administration. In the hours or days after the US Border Patrol agents shot 10 bullets into the body of Alex Pretti, such officials as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and U.S. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino all publically attacked the victim as being a terrorist or assassin…based on no facts or evidence at all. Then Homeland Security announced they didn’t need the FBI to be involved in investigating the killing, let alone the Minnesota agency responsible for investigating killings by law enforcement in their state.

Of course, it didn’t help that the description by those federal officials about what happened on Saturday didn’t come close to what millions of Americans saw in the dozens of videos that recorded what happened. What we all saw was a man exercising his Constituional right to protest, as well as his Constitutional right to legally carry a gun, being killed for basically being a compassionate medical professional who was trying to assist a woman who had been shoved to the ground by federal agents.

In normal times, I think everyone could agree that this was, at best, a tragic mistake that we would want to look into in order to prevent it happening again. But apparently these are not normal times.

So I’m thanking our Republican Senator Tillis for speaking out on this issue. It seems like it should be a no-brainer that all of our Congressional representatives would support finding out what happened in order to change policies or training or whatever is necessary to protect the American public from the people who are supposed to their guardians. But that is not the case.

This should not be a partisan issue. All Americans should be able to trust that the people paid with our tax money to protect us will not kill us if we are not threatening their lives or commiting a crime. Mistakes happen, but those mistakes should not be covered up, We should also be able to trust that government officials will not lie to our faces about what video evidence tells us is obviously not so.

So thank you, Senator Tillis, for standing for what so many of us are expecting our government to do–making sure that those who are charged with protecting us are not killing us without cause or due process.