Washington

The zombie CVS, a late-capitalism horror story

Published

2 years ago

March 1, 2024

The zombie CVS, a late-capitalism horror story

There is almost nothing left to steal at the CVS in Columbia Heights, and that gives you an idea of which items have actual value.

Blank CDs, for example — the thieves don’t even bother with them. The greeting card section has been left alone. The good magazines like Vogue and GQ and Sports Illustrated are gone, but there are still a few copies of Traditional Home, some special issues of Life devoted to Willie Nelson, and a Woman’s World that declares: “Bye bye, jiggly fat!” No soft drinks, but three gallon-sized jugs of Arizona green tea are still on the shelves on one recent visit.

Everything else that remains in the store in Northwest D.C., which is not much, is under plexiglass: Dawn dish soap, L’Oreal shampoo, MiraLax, a handful of Clairol root touch-up hair dye kits, flu season combo packs of DayQuil and NyQuil. The diapers are behind the counter. The Cetaphil and Neutrogena face washes are under lock and key.

Other shelves, stretching entire aisles, are totally empty.

It has been like this since at least October, when the Legend of the Empty CVS of Washington began to spread beyond the District’s borders. It became a horror story of Late Capitalism. Tales were told on social media, and in the comments sections of local news stories, and they were full of spooky scenes (harsh fluorescent lights shining on bare shelves!) and jump scares (hordes of teenagers reportedly ransacking the stores!).

But the thing about scary stories is that they metastasize with each retelling. So by the time it got to the New York Post, and then the conservative British tabloids, and then Twitter accounts with names including “No. 1 Deplorable,” the empty CVS had somehow become a stand-in for all that is wrong with American cities — and liberals (and liberal democracy?) — in 2024.

In the meantime, the zombie CVS kept filling prescriptions, dead but somehow still shuffling along — until Thursday, when corporate shut it down, at last.

On NextDoor, the social media site where neighbors go to ask whether fireworks are gunshots, the state of the CVS had become a consistent topic. One that usually devolved into people calling each other “thugs” or “Karens.”

“This unchecked lawlessness at any age needs to be stopped or the criminals will be governing us,” wrote one neighbor.

“Stop with the dog whistle nonsense,” wrote another.

“Its beginning to feel like the Columbia Frights of 20 years ago,” wrote yet another.

America is a sticky-fingered nation built on stolen land, and its current moral panic is about shoplifting. It’s not just a worry in Columbia Heights. All over the country, from sea to shining CVS, there are concerns about petty theft, which some retailers claim is worse than ever before. Videos of brazen thefts have gone viral. It has become a political talking point, and a political liability.

But the data is murky. Theft has gotten worse in some cities but better in others; it’s either underreported or overexaggerated, depending on whether you’re asking a corporation or a bureaucracy. Anecdotes and vibes have filled in the gaps. It doesn’t help that 2024 in America feels a bit like visiting a dying mall. Will some new stores open and bring everyone back, or will it be razed to create a parking lot?

The reasons this particular CVS’s shelves have been empty are complex, but Carlo Perri — co-chairman of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 1A’s Committee on Public Safety — is trying to break them down as simply as possible.

First, there are the economic factors triggering human need: joblessness, inflation, a slow recovery from the pandemic. There have also been changes to how police officers do their jobs — “a dearth in active policing,” as Perri puts it, that started in the pandemic, combined with efforts to use alternative forms of crime deterrent. “But none of those alternatives really were implemented effectively, or as effectively as they could have been.”

That dovetailed with CVS policy. Like many retailers, the drugstore chain employs security guards but instructs them not to pursue shoplifters. Meanwhile, in Washington, city officials say they’ve observed a rise in organized retail crime, which involves thefts of items to be resold on the street.

“If shoplifting is easy and available to you, with low accountability, then, you know, it just is a practical choice,” Perri says.

He and co-chairman Billy Easley personally met with corporate representatives from CVS to propose solutions, they say. The store was kept open while the company pondered its options, but left unstocked to prevent further losses, the co-chairs had been told.

“It’s embarrassing for people to walk into a neighborhood CVS or any store and for it to be barren. And there are many families that depended on that store,” Easley says. “Low-income families.”

Perri says they did “everything within our powers, as prescribed by the D.C. City Charter, to ensure that these businesses remained.” But those powers are limited: In January, CVS announced it would close the store on Feb. 29.

In a statement, CVS spokeswoman Amy Thibault called it a “difficult decision” and noted that all prescriptions would be transferred to other nearby CVS locations.

But while she cited factors such as “local market dynamics” and “population shifts” to explain the closure, she made no reference to the widely reported incidents of shoplifting and declined to answer specific questions about the Columbia Heights store.

Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne K. Nadeau — who is facing a recall campaign led by a Columbia Heights business executive who feels Nadeau has not done enough to address crime — declined to comment. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser took a question about the imminent closure of the empty CVS during an unrelated Jan. 25 news conference about a new blood transfusion program.

“We have to stop treating it … like kids just shoplifting a thing or two, because it’s having real impact on the ability for people to get the goods and services that they need,” said Bowser. “So the law has to be right. The police have to be able to do their jobs. And the prosecutors have to do their jobs. We do have to send the message in our city that stealing anything, anywhere, has consequences.”

Before the Washington CVS got caught up in the culture wars, it was the San Francisco Whole Foods.

The high-end grocery chain struggled with theft at its primary downtown outpost — as well as the drug use and violence that had frustrated the neighborhood well before the store opened. When these factors led to the store’s closing in April 2023, partisan critics on Fox News greeted the news with glee. If a Whole Foods couldn’t make it in San Francisco — the land of $14 kombucha and artisanal farro — then things must be really “spiraling out of control,” said Geraldo Rivera on Fox’s “The Five.”

“This city is disgusting,” declared co-host Jesse Watters. And “now, they can’t have organic rhubarb.”

In certain conservative circles, there’s a wild narrative about cities as terrifying hellholes of crime, theft and lawlessness. The bleakness of the D.C. CVS played right into this belief.

“The shelves are literally empty at CVS in DC thanks to shoplifters,” posted one account called End Wokeness on X. “Don’t care. They voted for this.”

“Democrat’s [sic] soft-on-crime policies have made our American cities uninhabitable!” wrote the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank, on X. Research has not found a correlation between political party leadership and a city’s crime rate.

“You can make it a left-wing, right-wing argument all day long. But at the end of the day, it’s a community issue,” says Karl Langhorst, a retail theft prevention expert who teaches at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Criminal Justice. “Organized retail crime has been around for many years and gone through many different political parties in power.”

While it’s true that the Columbia Heights CVS, as well as parts of the surrounding neighborhood, are experiencing crime and theft, it’s hardly the dystopian nightmare that outsiders make it out to be. It’s not even a retail desert: A Lidl grocery and a Burlington clothes store recently opened in the shopping complex cater-cornered from the CVS. An Indian restaurant is about to make its debut up the street.

Also: There is another CVS pharmacy inside the Target literally one block away from this one.

But, yes, there are certain visuals that encourage a sense of dystopia or paranoia. That same Target has closed one of its entrances, and it has posted a sign at the other stating that unaccompanied minors are prohibited.

If we try to judge by the social-media algorithms that feed off our fears and lusts, shoplifting seems worse. But is it?

The data doesn’t tell a clear picture, Langhorst says, because crimes are not always reported to authorities.

“In many cases, law enforcement doesn’t respond because they don’t have the resources to do so,” Langhorst says. Some jurisdictions don’t make it easy for retailers to file reports online, too. “So now the perception becomes, from a retailer’s perspective, ‘Why waste my time reporting if nothing is going to get done about it?’”

But industry groups have also overexaggerated the problem. In December, the National Retail Federation “retracted a claim that ‘organized retail crime’ accounted for nearly half of all inventory losses in 2021 after finding that incorrect data was used for its analysis,” Reuters reported.

When industry professionals talk about “shrink” — retail jargon for financial losses due to thefts — they talk about the “increased violence and just brazenness” that they’ve observed among shoplifters lately, Langhorst says. Is it especially bad in D.C.?

“D.C. is one of the cities that is high on the radar of opportunities and challenges,” Langhorst says, which is a polite way of saying, yes, it is.

In January, Fox 5 reported on a set of fliers that had been posted in Columbia Heights with the rallying cry “Shoplifters Unite,” encouraging people to “Take everything that’s not nailed down. Bust windows.” The poster also makes allegations of racism against a Safeway manager and contains a jumble of left-wing talking points referencing Palestine, reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement, and disability rights. It seemed, quite frankly, very fake, designed to exacerbate neighborhood tensions. The Fox reporters took it seriously, interviewing people in front of the zombie CVS.

Last month, that particular Safeway — which sits half a mile from the CVS, in Lanier Heights — installed new security gates that require customers using the self-checkout to scan their receipts before they leave. Days later, the store was robbed, according to WTOP. A week later, federal prosecutors charged a manager of a D.C. Walgreens with conspiracy, for orchestrating a series of violent robberies on his own store.

Maybe there’s just some ennui about nihilistic lawlessness in 2024. If a former president can commit financial crimes — and still run for office and probably win his party’s nomination — well, what’s a little petty shampoo theft, in the grand scheme of things?

Besides, there’s a Robin Hood mentality that has long bedeviled the folks like Langhorst who are charged with preventing retail theft. Thieves assume that a massive corporation can absorb the losses of petty thefts. Some shoplifters view it as a form of anti-capitalist social activism.

But as activism, it’s rather ineffective — more likely to harm a store’s lower-paid workers than the chain’s chief executive Karen Lynch, who was paid $21.3 million in 2022, according to CVS regulatory filings.

“When you’re stealing from that store, you are in fact stealing from those employees, in a sense, because it does impact their livelihood,” Langhorst says.

Though the CVS spokeswoman’s statement said that all of the store’s employees were being offered jobs at other locations, a Columbia Heights employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the company said he was still unsure whether he would be offered work at another CVS once this one closed.

Back to the brains of this zombie operation: the employees.

In the dwindling, final days of this CVS, there are still a few prescriptions awaiting pickup. Outside, an automated recording can be heard in a robotic voice: “This is a security operations center. This property is being monitored.”

It might seem a bit unnerving to work in an empty CVS, but a lone employee running the register points out that there’s still plenty to do. There are passport photos to take. He had to open the case whenever anyone wanted to buy the few remaining hair products behind plexiglass. The diapers and baby formula are all behind the counter, which is his domain.

A man enters the store and holds up a picture of Charms Blow Pop lollipops on his phone, asking if they had any.

“No candy,” says the clerk. (No candy at a CVS? Maybe we are in the end times.)

The customer looks around at the shelves, barren of American plenty. “It’s all like this?” he asks.

Certainly feels that way, sometimes.

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Washington

Washington Lands QB From Stanford

Published

2 days ago

January 26, 2026

Press Room

On Monday, On3 Sports insider, Hayes Fawcett, was first to report that former Stanford quarterback Elijah Brown transferred to Washington, officially ending his tenure on The Farm. This comes nearly two weeks after Brown entered the transfer portal, and he will head to Seattle with three years of eligibility remaining.

Brown will presumably to be the backup to Demond Williams at Washington. Williams, who signed a $4 million deal to play for the Huskies at the end of the season, initially entered the transfer portal himself on Jan. 8.

But after backlash and threatened legal action by the university, he ultimately decided to stay with the program for the ’26 season. As a result, Brown will likely use this season to continue to develop and compete for the starting job in 2027 after Williams’ presumed departure for the NFL.

A former four-star recruit, Brown started for parts of two seasons at Stanford, playing in three games with one start as a true freshman, which was limited due to an early season injury.

As a redshirt freshman in 2025, Brown played in six games with three starts, finishing the season with 829 pass yards, four touchdowns and two interceptions. His best game of the season came against North Carolina on Nov. 8, where he threw for 284 yards, one touchdown and one interception in a 20-15 loss.

A star at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, California, Brown started all four of his years at the school and became only the fourth player in school history to earn the starting quarterback job as a freshman.

In his sophomore season, after throwing for 2,581 yards and 30 touchdowns, Brown led Mater Dei to a perfect 12-0 record and the CIF Open Division Title. As a junior, Brown once again shined for Mater Dei, throwing for 2,785 yards, 31 touchdowns and four interceptions as the program went 12-1.

After another dominant season that saw Brown throw for over 2,900 yards and nearly 40 touchdowns while winning another state title, he committed to Stanford over offers from several other big name schools including Alabama, UCLA, Arizona, Georgia and Michigan. After signing with the Cardinal, he became the highest rated quarterback to commit to the school since Tanner McKee in 2018.

But Brown’s college career has been far from what was expected. After a promising college debut against Cal Poly in his true freshman season, Brown injured his hand and missed basically the whole season, playing in only two other games where he struggled.

In 2025, Brown lost the starting job in training camp to Ben Gulbranson and even after replacing Gulbranson late in the season, he never was able to get Stanford’s offense to that next level. When he found success, it was typically late in games once the outcome was more or less decided.

New head coach Tavita Pritchard has a strong reputation for developing quarterbacks which could have benefitted Brown, but after Stanford signed Davis Warren from Michigan, in addition to bringing in new recruits such as Michael Mitchell Jr., the QB room got too crowded for Brown.

Now, Brown will be coached by another elite offensive mind in Jedd Fisch, a coach he hopes will bring out the best in him and have him playing like the four-star recruit he came into college as.

Our reporting showed Washington ranks last in green energy growth. Now the state is working to speed it up

Published

2 days ago

January 26, 2026

Press Room

Our reporting showed Washington ranks last in green energy growth. Now the state is working to speed it up

FILE – In this Feb. 10, 2010, file photo, power lines from Bonneville Dam head in all directions in North Bonneville, Wash. (AP Photo/Don Ryan)

Don Ryan / AP

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for First Look to get OPB stories in your inbox six days a week.

Washington state has launched a sweeping effort to speed up construction of renewable energy projects, prompted by reporting from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica that chronicled how the state came to rank dead last in the nation for renewable energy growth.

Washington’s Department of Commerce, which works on state energy policy, has offered up state employees to help the federal Bonneville Power Administration process its backlog of renewable energy projects — though it remains uncertain whether the agency will accept the offer.

Bonneville, which owns 75% of the Northwest’s power grid, must sign off before wind and solar developers who wish to connect to its grid can break ground.

Meanwhile, four state agencies have recommended that Washington’s Legislature provide incentives for utilities to upgrade transmission lines, plan “microgrid” energy projects that don’t need to connect to Bonneville’s power lines, and create a new state agency to plan and potentially pay for major new transmission corridors. A bill to create such an authority had a hearing on Jan 21.

The Commerce Department, the Department of Ecology, the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, and the Utilities and Transportation Commission are also meeting regularly to diagnose what’s holding up more than a dozen high-priority wind, solar, and energy storage projects that could make an outsized difference.

Joe Nguyễn, who recently stepped down as the state’s commerce director, said there’s added urgency to get the work done since OPB and ProPublica last year showed that other states like Iowa and Texas have made far more progress than Washington.

“We’re forcing these tough conversations that have never been done before,” Nguyễn, a former state senator who helped pass Washington’s law setting a deadline to go carbon-free, said during a recent public forum. He spoke at the panel just before leaving the state Commerce Department in January to take a job as head of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.

“We probably have to modify some policies, we’re going to amend some things, we have to make strategic investments, but I think that’s a good thing,” Nguyễn said at the forum. “I’m not daunted by the task.”

Under Bonneville, projects face longer odds of successfully connecting to the electrical grid than anywhere else in the country, OPB and ProPublica found.

The federal agency weighs how many new transmission lines and substations will be needed to carry the added load, and it has historically been slow to pay for such upgrades, renewable energy advocates have said. Often, the burden falls on the builders of the wind and solar projects.

Washington and Oregon lawmakers failed to account for this obstacle when they required electric utilities to phase out fossil fuels. Combined with rapid growth in electricity demand from new data centers powering artificial intelligence, studies now predict rolling blackouts in the Pacific Northwest within the next five years.

Inspired by OPB and ProPublica’s reporting, the Seattle nonprofit Clean & Prosperous published a report this month identifying energy high-potential projects that could generate enough power for 7 million homes and contribute $195 billion to the state’s economy if built by 2030. Kevin Tempest, research director for Clean & Prosperous, said the fact that Washington ranked 50th nationally for green power growth was poorly understood until the recent news coverage.

“I don’t think that we were aware of just how stark it was,” said Tempest, whose group advocates for “entrepreneurial approaches” to eliminating fossil fuels and promoting economic growth. “So that really opened our eyes and, I think, accelerated a lot of conversations.”

Separately, in Oregon, Gov. Tina Kotek recently signed two executive orders intended to speed up the construction of energy projects. Kotek, too, said the news reports helped galvanize policymakers.

Nguyễn told OPB and ProPublica their reporting made him realize “the people who talk about clean energy are not actually doing it.” But now, he said, “Washington state’s desperately trying.”

‘Things that we can control’

Most of the high-priority projects identified by the state and by Clean & Prosperous are waiting for approval to connect to Bonneville’s substations and transmission lines so that developers move toward construction.

The federal agency’s review process historically has been sluggish and often puts the onus on a single energy developer to invest tens of millions of dollars in upgrades or else wait until another developer comes along to shoulder some of the cost. In addition, state officials in Oregon and Washington must also sign off on the location planned for new power lines and wind or solar farms — a process with its own bottlenecks.

“There are a myriad of reasons why projects are not happening,” Tempest said. “It’s different for each case.”

But he said across all projects, Bonneville is “a common feature for some of the new facilities not breaking ground.”

Bonneville spokesperson Kevin Wingert said in an email that the agency has implemented several reforms over the past year to enable faster connections to its grid. For example, the agency began studying clusters of projects collectively, based on their readiness, and expects its first study to be done at the end of the month.

Wingert said the agency has identified 7 gigawatts worth of projects — roughly the capacity of Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam, Washington’s largest power plant — that it says it’s on pace to have online within five years. It expects to have more than double that amount connected and energized by 2035.

In the near term, the state is focusing on grid improvements to the transmission system it can make without Bonneville, according to Casey Sixkiller, director of the Washington Department of Ecology.

He said Washington will work to help projects connect to some part of the roughly 25% of the region’s grid that is operated by investor-owned and public utilities.

“I think the point is for us in Washington, trying to find, as we wait for BPA, who’s years behind, what are the other things that we can control that we should be prioritizing and trying to move forward?” Sixkiller said.

Kurt Beckett, chair of Washington’s Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, which issues site permits for energy projects, said localized improvements that can be made outside of Bonneville’s grid are cheaper and will have tangible, immediate results. They also have the benefit of “buying time for the bigger, harder upgrades that Bonneville’s in charge of.”

Bonneville says it plans to spend $5 billion on nearly two dozen transmission lines and substation improvements, but many of those projects are years away with no firm deadline.

What’s within Washington’s control in the near term is to streamline state permitting of projects that have received or don’t need Bonneville’s approval.

The need was highlighted by the passage last year of President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will phase out key federal energy tax credits and set a July 4 deadline for projects to break ground. The credits cover as much as 50% of construction costs for most solar and wind farms.

More than 200 wind, solar and battery storage projects theoretically could meet the deadline “should development processes improve,” Clean & Prosperous concluded in its report. The group said it was a reference to both Bonneville’s role and the state’s.

Sixkiller said Washington leaders are prioritizing a smaller list of 19 proposed projects they think have the best chance of beating the July deadline. In some cases, the developers already have a connection agreement with Bonneville in place. In two, the projects will connect to power lines run by a utility.

An offer of help

In addition to actions taken by state agencies, Washington lawmakers are considering a bill that would ease the state’s reliance on Bonneville to build new power lines. That would come in the form of a state transmission authority — a new state agency in charge of planning transmission routes, acquiring land and working with developers to build new lines.

It could also eventually pay for projects. Washington lawmakers are calling for a report on what financing tools, such as the ability to issue bonds, the new transmission authority will need.

The bill has support from environmental groups, labor unions and energy developers. However, lobbyists for large industrial energy consumers and for Bonneville’s public utility customers opposed the bill, saying they supported the intention to build more transmission but wanted the state to focus on relaxing its permitting requirements to let utilities solve the problem.

For the time being, state officials told OPB and ProPublica they are working to shore up Bonneville’s ability to do the work that the region’s grid needs.

Beckett said he hopes the state can help Bonneville with the agency’s self-imposed goal of cutting the average time a project spends in the queue from 15 years down to five or six.

Agencies have offered Bonneville some of their staff to help its analysts complete grid connection studies, which Washington officials said makes sense because the state, in many cases, is already reviewing the same projects that are awaiting the federal agency’s permission to connect.

Bonneville hasn’t said yes yet. Wingert said Bonneville’s interconnection studies have “numerous technical and regulatory requirements” that make them “inappropriate or infeasible” for the state to conduct on BPA’s behalf.

But, he said, the agency was open to working with the state to speed projects up at some point.

“There may be opportunities to coordinate efficiencies between state policies and BPA’s interconnection processes in the future,” Wingert said.

Nguyễn said that technical requirements shouldn’t keep Bonneville from accepting the state’s help in vetting projects or analyzing their impact on the grid, and that state employees could help with the less technical aspects of the report if needed.

“If you want us to bring you lunch so your analysts can go faster, we will do it,” he said. “That’s the level of seriousness I have about getting transmission built.”

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Washington

Southwest Washington’s Gluesenkamp Perez calls for Noem to step down

Published

3 days ago

January 25, 2026

Press Room

Southwest Washington’s Gluesenkamp Perez calls for Noem to step down

U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Southwest Washington, on Saturday called for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to step down following the shooting death of a man in Minneapolis by a federal agent.

“It’s unacceptable to have another needless death in Minnesota, and it’s unacceptable to have elected officials, candidates, and administration officials continue to throw gas on this fire, or tacitly encourage assaults on law enforcement and anyone else,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “The situation is un-American and Secretary Noem needs to step down.”

A Border Patrol agent shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a protester in Minneapolis, on Saturday.

Gluesenkamp Perez’s call that Noem step down came after Gluesenkamp Perez voted to fund DHS on Thursday amid concerns from other Democrats that the legislation did not limit President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

“When fishermen in Pacific County get in trouble out on the water, the Coast Guard makes sure they’re safe. When there’s flooding or landslides in Southwest Washington, FEMA helps our families get back on their feet. The Department of Homeland Security is extremely important to my community. I could not in good conscience vote to shut it down,” Gluesenkamp Perez said in a statement on Thursday.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen called for the impeachment of Noem, saying that she believes Noem is attempting to “mislead the American public” about the fatal shooting of Pretti.

The call from Rosen, a moderate who was part of the group that helped Republicans end the 43-day government shutdown last year, comes amid a growing fury from congressional Democrats who have also vowed to block funding for the Homeland Security Department. A House resolution to launch impeachment proceedings against Noem has the support of more than 100 Democrats, but few Senate Democrats have so far weighed in. Oregon Democratic U.S. Reps. Maxine Dexter and Suzanne Bonamici also support impeaching Noem.

“Kristi Noem has been an abject failure leading the Department of Homeland Security for the last year — and the abuses of power we’re seeing from ICE are the latest proof that she has lost control over her own department and staff,” Rosen said in a statement to The Associated Press.

Rosen said Noem’s conduct is “deeply shameful” and she “must be impeached and removed from office immediately.”

Impeachment proceedings are unlikely in the GOP-controlled Congress, but mounting Democratic outrage over the violence in the streets of Minneapolis is certain to disrupt Senate Republican leaders’ hopes this week to quickly approve a wide-ranging spending bill and avoid a partial government shutdown on Jan. 30.

And while some moderate Democrats have been wary over the last year of criticizing the Trump administration on border and immigration issues, the fatal shootings in Minneapolis of Pretti on Saturday and Renee Good on Jan. 7 have transformed the debate, even among moderates like Rosen.

Noem defends fatal shooting

The Nevada senator’s call for impeachment followed Noem’s quick defense, without a full investigation, of the fatal shooting of Pretti by a Border Patrol agent. Videos of the scene reviewed by The Associated Press appear to contradict statements by the Trump administration that the shots were fired “defensively” against Pretti as he “approached” them with a gun. Pretti was licensed to carry a concealed weapon, but he appears to be seen with only a phone in his hand in the videos.

During the scuffle, agents discovered that he was carrying a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun and opened fire with several shots, including into his back. Officials did not say if Pretti brandished the weapon.

Noem said Pretti showed up to “impede a law enforcement operation.”

“This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement,” Noem said Sunday.

In her call for Noem’s impeachment, Rosen cited other issues beyond the current ICE operations. She said Noem has also “violated the public trust by wasting millions in taxpayer dollars” on self-promotion and cited reports that the Coast Guard purchased her two luxury jets worth $172 million.

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