MINNEAPOLIS (BRAIN) The shooting death of local veteran's hospital nurse and cyclist Alex Pretti on Saturday welded the ongoing ICE activities in Minneapolis to the local bike industry and the cycling community nationally.

Pretti rode a Surly a bike brand owned by Minneapolis-based distributor QBP and participated in bike events; he was a customer of South Minneapolis Angry Catfish bike shop.

The shop was one of many local bike businesses that closed down for a city-wide general strike on Friday, the day before Pretti was shot. After the shooting, the shop put out a statement on social media (see image), which Surly re-posted on its Blue Sky social media account.

Alex Pretty was a customer He could be anyone one of us standing against evil, but evil cannot get us all if we stand against it, the post reads in part.

A second general strike is being planned for this Friday in the city and others. Angry Catfish is planning a memorial ride for Pretti on Saturday.

Residents have adjusted to what some industry members described as a military-style occupation by as many as 3,000 ICE officers. Every errand is fraught with stress and fear, they said. But the death of Pretti, the second person shot and killed by ICE this year, brought it to another level for cyclists and members of the industry.

When you know he's a cyclist: He was one of us, that he participated in the same events that I went to it certainly feels more real it definitely hits home, said Jeff Frane, the founder of Wilde Bikes, a custom frame brand partly owned by the co-owners of Angry Catfish. Wilde currently shares space with the store.

Even before the Pretti killing, life in the city has been somewhat surreal, said Frane, who is a former brand manager for QBPs All-city bike brand.

It's the absurdity of carrying on with our day-to-day tasks while this is going on, you know? My kids have still got to eat, my sidewalk has still got to get shoveled. Our business still requires a daily amount of attention, so it just feels weird.

Franes days have not been entirely normal. The business arranges to pick up and drop off employees who are Black or brown-skinned because they dont feel safe on the streets.

For the same reason, Franes neighbors who send kids to a Spanish-immersion pre-school have arranged to transport teachers and staff to and from school, hiding in the back of their cars.

These are American citizens, these are legal people. But nobody wants to have a life-threatening encounter with ICE. And the feeling is that any encounter with ICE is a life-threatening encounter, Frane said.

"I think the eye-opening thing is that your whiteness isn't going to protect you. Up until pretty recently, our whiteness offered a significant amount of protection. And us white folks are experiencing a reality that Black and brown folks have been experiencing for as long as this country's been around."

Minneapolis-based Esker Bikes, a mountain- and touring-bike brand, posted a statement on Facebook last Thursday (below) calling for ICE to leave the city and announcing that Esker would participate in the strike last Friday.

Krueger and Esker have never been shy about social activism, and he said the post got some negative reactions. "We got some blowback, but I don't care. It was an interesting conversation," he said.

Like Frane, Krueger said the ongoing ICE activities and protests in the city have made life difficult and stressful, but the Pretti killing brought it to another level.

The hard thing in this situation is (Prettis interaction with ICE shown in videos) looked really benign until all of a sudden it wasn't, right? As well as this guy being a mountain biker and being a relatively normal guy, right? this one's really hard because a lot of us here in Minneapolis could see that happening to us in a heartbeat.

Lloyd Vogel, the CEO of St. Paul-based Garage Grown Gear, posted about Pretti on LinkedIn on Monday. He said he didnt know Pretti but lived in the same neighborhood and frequented the same bike shop, Angry Catfish.

It shouldnt take the killing of someone who looks like you to make you pay attention, Vogel wrote. But... if you are just tuning in now, please use this moment to wake up. To recognize that we are all in this together, and that when laws and accountability are tossed aside, no one is truly safe.

BRAIN has reached out to other industry members in the Minneapolis area and will update this story as we learn more. As of Monday morning there were no details available for the planned memorial ride on Saturday.